I teach mathematics in a modern classroom. There is wireless, but there is also a tangled web of wires. The students are attentive, but they are easily distracted. They all have laptops, and they listen to the teacher, sort of, and they look at the screen, sort of, and they complete their assignments, sort of. They exhibit continuous partial attention (Stone, 2008), which is all a math teacher can hope for when his explanation of the binomial theorem is competing with Hi-5 and YouTube.

Recently, the 10^th-graders entered for their mathematics lesson. There was the familiar buzz: the unzipping of bags and unfolding of laptops, young legs tripping over each other to get to the power plugs, 20 repetitions of the obnoxious Windows startup sound, and the laughter and chirping of the informal learning space between lessons: when students quickly check their inboxes and Facebook pages, hoping for a joke but dreading another assignment.

As they settled in, one of the brightest students, Puja, asked me sincerely:

"could you please be quiet today, and just let us do our work?"

I laughed and agreed to her request. I abandoned my lesson plan and spent the lesson circulating the room, carefully stepping over their power cords, chatting with students and answering their questions.

Puja's question was profound. It sums up the changes in education since the arrival of the World Wide Web. How did this happen? Have teachers become obsolete? Will future generations ignore their teachers entirely?

I appreciate Puja's candor. She was telling me what many students (and teachers) want to say but are afraid to utter:

"I own my own attention, and I'm tired of you taking it away from me!"

Paying attention to attention is becoming one of the most important aspects of teaching and learning in the Digital Age. There are approximately one trillion websites competing for our attention (Alpert 2008). The competition for
attention is intense. Remember, just 5 years ago, when many websites requested a username and a password, or maybe even a credit card number (hah!) just to view them? They all met the same fate: Death by the Quick Click.

Now I see teachers spending hours and hours designing their websites, integrating graphics, adding pages and pages of wikis to the portal, etc. Whenever I walk into their classrooms, they ask me to "have a look at this!" They pester the principal and other administrators with similar requests: in short, with requests for attention. The only problem is: students aren't looking at our carefully prepared websites on the Crimean War! They find Facebook
more interesting, and when they finally get down to doing their history homework (often after midnight), they have more efficient means of obtaining information.

A typical international school now has an extensive portal with thousands upon thousands of pages. These portals are useful because they explain tasks and curricular materials. However, most teachers were educated before the Digital Age and we approach education from a content-driven perspective. We have poured enormous amounts of energy and time into putting content on portal sites and websites. We tell the students, "please read this assignment; it is on the portal" or, "please watch this video; get the link from my website." However, many, if not most, students ignore the instructions and find their own materials using Wikipedia and Google. This is a fundamental miscommunication; why does it occur? Because we are not paying attention to the students' habits; or, if we are paying attention, we often just try to change those habits, unsuccessfully.

Recently, a very bright student asked me for a file. "Get it from the portal," I told her.

"Please, can you just email it to me; I hate that portal," she replied.

"Why?" I asked.

"It's like one of those mirror mazes at an amusement park-you can get in but you can never get out."

Students also must start paying attention to attention. We are now in the cut-and-paste age and their products tend to be too lengthy. I recently spoke to a student who had just submitted a 43-page paper on matrices. It was just a routine assignment and I'm sure the teacher was hoping for about two pages. I asked the student, "when you submit these 40-page papers, and I know students do it not only in mathematics, but in humanities or science as well, are you seeing evidence that your teachers actually read them?"

She paused, and then answered, "sometimes."

She was startled by my question, and she had clearly never considered it. Students are not writing for human beings. They are writing to complete tasks. She seemed to think that her paper would not be graded by a human being, but by a robot.

With the proliferation of the World Wide Web, we now live in a world where one's attention is a valuable commodity. Students are aware of this; teachers less so. We teachers grew up in an environment where we were expected to pay attention to our teachers; the modern student quite rightly sees the teacher as just another adult clamoring for her attention. So is the Vice-Principal, so is the VJ, so is the soccer star selling fashionable clothes.

Teaching and learning in the Digital Age requires honest bargaining, between teachers and students, about swapping attention. As teachers and students interact with each other, there are multiple competitors grasping at our attention through many forms of media and electronic communication. The teacher's role is changing. Not one of us is as knowledgeable as Wikipedia. So, what can teachers offer that students cannot find on the web? Successful teachers can make
students want to learn our subjects and overcome the distractions, both by making our presence interesting, and by offering personal warmth and compassion.

We cannot demand students' attention or threaten them with negative consequences if they don't pay attention. In a world that is screaming "LOOK AT ME!" good teachers will not join the cacophony, but instead will become good listeners. In a world where advertising, light pollution, sound pollution and information overload are replacing human interaction, good teachers will develop the human side of the teacher-pupil relationship. How does one become a successful teacher in the Digital Age? One must start by paying attention to attention.

Works Cited

Alpert, Jesse & Hajaj, Nissan. We knew the web was big...
July 25, 2008. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html
(accessed February 3, 2009).

Stone, Linda. Fine Dining with Mobile Devices. January 2008. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-stone/fine-dining-with-mobile-d_b_80... (accessed January 29, 2009).