How can teenagers teach us to cope with information overload?

Amethyst leads me to reflect on the way my students handle change better than me.

In October, students’ lives accelerate. The new challenges that come with the next level of school catch up and begin to smother some students. Anyone in a school becomes aware of how quickly everything goes and change, how quickly the two weeks between essays’ due dates pass when, a day or two after returning the first batch, the next batch comes in. It seems like this is a little bit what parenting is like, too, though I wouldn’t know myself. One day your kid is a very fragile lump of potatoes, and a month or two later it’s just a single very large potato with legs strong enough to walk on. 

Maybe it’s because Amethyst spends her days with teenagers, like I do, that she’s attuned to the ways that Things Change. We spoke earlier this week for an interview that I haven’t yet posted on In REAL Time. Though she’s (even) younger than I am, and earlier in her career, Amethyst and I connected over this sense that nothing in life seems to stay for very long. Her answer to one of the usual questions that I ask, “When historians recount 2020-1, what will the be especially fascinated by?,” returned this answer:

“[I’m interested in] What’s culturally relevant. I really got into a TikTok spiral during the

pandemic. It’s so fascinating what we gravitate towards in hard times and isolation. I think historians will also be compelled by how fleeting a lot of things have been. Everything from Black Lives Matter to a TikTok dance can be a social trend that comes and goes out of public attention. What makes something culturally relevant and what does its relevance say about our social, cultural, and economic reality? What makes it stick and not stick?”

Nothing feels very sticky these days, except maybe the wrong things (viruses and politicians, for a couple examples). What’s ironic about working with teenagers is that it’s a teacher’s job to make information stick in their students’ minds, but those students are pretty much biologically predisposed to avoid sticking. As much as kids often say that they struggle with change (new classrooms, new standards), they also say that they hate anything that stays the same. A critical part of adolescence experience is the effort made to try on different identities. Some teenagers do this outwardly, shifting patterns of dress and behavior, posture and piercings; others, like I did, do it largely in their imaginations, uninterested in troubling the waters but nonetheless always curious about what life would be like if I tried to be someone different. Teenagers don’t tend to stick on something for very long, though they also tend to let certain experiences linger and take over their minds, crystallizing into profound parts of their identities. It is almost impossible to predict what will stick. This wiring shifts during adulthood for a lot of people, but not for everyone; many people (including highly successful people) thrive on and crave the next and newest endeavor. Many of us even lean on novelty as a coping mechanism. I might even be one of those people; that might even be part of why I like teaching so much. 

Faced with flighty attention spans, teachers have to try to make something - skills, content, ideas - stick inside students’ minds to consider their work successful. Peter Brown, Henry Roedinger, and Mark McDaniel’s Make it Stick is considered essential reading for educators these days. I’d call it essential reading for any person who’s interested in reworking and improving personal strategies for learning and growing. Its popularity belies the fact that “stickiness” is something that most people - even traditionally very successful types - struggle with. Given the acceleration of technology, the access that almost everyone has to constantly new content, stimulation, and ideas, it often feels to me like fewer things “stick” as part of zeitgeist for more than half a day. When nothing really sticks, we all get to enjoy that permanent excitement of adolescence, but that decreased impulse to settle into ideas, concepts, trends, commitments, or interests is also unsettling. 

Amethyst asked the question: “What makes something culturally relevant and what does its relevance say about our social, cultural, and economic reality?” It’s a cynical view to say that technology completely forms cultural trends, though correlation between the functions of apps and social networks and rising trends seems almost undeniable and undeniably scary. It’s important to remember, though, that human desires don’t always follow where logical design wants them to; this is why economists cannot perfectly model the world to come. Certainly, our social, cultural, and economic reality looks bleak when we recognize that cultural relevance is in some way determined by an algorithm, but there are other words that I can think of to describe that dynamic reality: exciting, chaotic, progressive, directionless, hopeful. Oftentimes, what is considered culturally relevant feels peripheral to me: my students tell me about the Telfar bag drop or show me TikTok videos replacing the words in songs with nonsense. Culturally relevant trends seem to move by me so quickly that I even question the word “relevant.” It makes me wonder whether anyone is really a part of that culture anymore, or if we’re all just on the outside, watching it stream by in a bluelit rush. And I wonder if, then, none of it can permeate our actual lives until we reach out and grab it. Do we slow the stream of change, or do we pull out something out of it, decide that it will be meaningful, then turn to one another and let that New Thing become part of us?

I think that students in school give us two ways to think through this lack of stickiness on an individual level. The first one is in their ability, eventually, to slow down the “new” and settle into some kind of fixed identity, still knowing that they’ll probably leave high school, go by a different nickname in college, start wearing different clothes and talking to people in a new way. The things we decide to stick with as a teenager are things that we stick with knowing that we probably won’t have them forever. After adolescence is over, though, everything starts to look like an idea, a concept, a political belief, a membership that, if we hold it, we have to hold onto forever. Teenagers don’t see that settling down to imply permanence. We don’t have to, either.

The second teenage model for coping with stickylessness is about reaching into that chaos of social trends rushing by, picking out a few as they pass by, and then walking away and make something with them. It’s a fairly unappealing tendency of teenagers to grab hold of social movements or trends and then really throw themselves in with abandon. But that tendency also one of their strengths, because they can still find the clarity that comes with near-obsession amid the chaos of overstimulating, fast-changing cultural and social trends. They’re not trying to understand everything and connect to everything, but they are trying to understand and connect to something. Crucially, they continue to reach in and grab new things to naturalize to themselves, where many adults pick their poison and settle, too comfortably, into it.

I’m not sure I have any way to slow down these unsticking trends, nor am I fully convinced that they’re not a net positive for human society. I do know that the way nothing seems to stick bothers me on a personal level. Since I, dispositionally, like to observe the trends and patterns from afar rather than entering into them, the rapidity of social trends makes it too easy to hold myself apart from them. This tempts me to believe that I’m neither responsible for or part of phenomena for which I actually am responsible and of which I actually am a part, whether I’ve chosen to be or not. I’m not an expert in the fields where the trends take root, except maybe the trends in education, which I often discuss here; but just because I’m not a direct subject or consumer of something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t shape me and isn’t shaped by me. These days, I want to model my individual behavior more after the teenagers, and maybe also after the historians Amethyst imagines in a hundred years. I want to make things stick for myself, even if just for a short time; I want to turn away from trying to understand everything and, in the process, give myself that chance to know something.