Multi-tasking Teens
[SUMMARY—Jess discusses whether it's a good or bad thing.]
(UK/WORLD) Exam season has just ended (hooray!) but when it comes to studying, parents are always nagging at us to focus on the page in front of us—not to instant message our friends, listen to music or text someone.
This article landed in my inbox the other day, whilst I was at school (coincidentally, at the time, I was adding to coursework and chatting to a friend) and DK asked me to write what I thought about it.
Multi-tasking has always said to be a skill inherent in girls. But nowadays I'm positive that boys can do it too. Just now, I was talking to my friend Alex, who said he was writing an essay for Religious Studies, discussing the Ontological Argument (whether God exists or not), listening to music and chatting to me at the same time. Whether boys can multi-task well or not is another question. Alex received his AS results a month ago—3 U's (Ungraded in Religious Studies, Government and Politics and Physics) and a D (in ICT).
My other friend Rebecca was sitting the same exams. She's had to juggle her band, her boyfriend and her studies in the past year. She came out with 4A's. I'm sure boys can multi-task, but do they allocate the right percentage of their brains to each activity?
As a rule of thumb, I tend to cut back on using the Internet, going to gigs and talking to friends when it comes to revision. But I still do it all, in moderation. Listening to music gets nearly everyone through their teenage years, especially in times of stress, anger and upset—and exam season is no different. For some people, music makes them calm, for some, it's just background noise, however for a minority, it is a way of life, an escape, a distraction—and this is when multi-tasking becomes negative. All attention is focused on a beat, on lyrics, on rhythms.
I can see the way us teenagers behave through the eyes of a parent. How can we possibly be trying to remember covalent molecular structures for our Chemistry exams, whilst drumming our fingers against tables? (I never saw how covalent bonding would ever help me in life…) But the fact is, the majority of us do our revision. We know how to organise our lives, our studies and everything else in between! We want to do well in the future, and we know that to do this, we need to revise ourselves to death!
I may be writing this from a naive teenager's point of view, but I feel we're given less credit than what's due. We make informed decisions for the best possible outcome. We don't want to narrow our horizons, nor do we want to make life any harder for ourselves.
Filed by DK on September 24 2006
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