Heard this term? I observed a striking example of this definition of our young people in action as I sat at the back of a group of nearly 100 fifth graders watching and listening to the President’s “First day of School” address September 8th (see previous blog entry).

The group was attentive and respectful, but when an adult’s cell phone rang in the audience, most heads sprang to the alert and turned in the direction of the ringer. It was momentary, as the embarrassed adult quickly found the phone and shut it off, but it was clear that this response was quite automatic. “Listening on high alert” has increasingly become a part of our children’s culture of distraction and, for many, high anxiety.

As I had this thought when I watched all the heads turn and then turn back to the President of the United States, I wondered if I was overreacting. But, as if to test my observation, a few moments later the familiar Windows “boot up” music sounded from a computer in another corner of the library where we were. Heads turned in Pavlovian response to these well-known sounds.

Students now respond immediately to technological signals offering “Attraction Distraction.” Whether Twitter, texting, Facebook, or cell phones and other handheld devices, these modern-day marvels teach children multi-tasking and what my daughter honestly admits to: life full of events and tasks lived to 80% completion.

The “good enough” task completion of a significant percentage of the current school generation, I feel, will make it difficult for many students to remember what their President asked them to do for their country yesterday, when they are so constantly consumed with what their electronics can do for them this very minute.

Yes, there are wonders and marvels in the new technology. But we are losing our ability to reflect. Hence we see a rapid rise in the use of school-based psychological diagnoses referring children for what are called “executive function” difficulties referenced to the frontal lobes of the brain and evidenced by increased inability to sort and organize ideas, environmental stimuli, potential actions, or considered decisions.

Two generations ago, Thomas Merton warned us of the hazards of living in a reality of “constant semi-attention” that “keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted: we are not quite “thinking,” not entirely responding, but we are more or less there. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available.”

Without teaching the practice of reflection and providing more time for reflection in the classroom and at home, I fear that one of this generation’s primary learning legacies could be mindless multi-tasking, a civilized behavior fictitiously foreshadowed, in part, in Lois Lowry’s Newbery Award–winning novel, The Giver, often read and discussed in middle school English classes.

Let’s hope our teachers can keep reflection at the forefront of teaching approaches by protecting times in the day where they ask open-ended questions about subject area content and allow students to share their thinking with each other and the class. This is how the children will construct a future of respectful listening, dialogue, and meaning for their lives.