I’ve been asked how my fall break was far too many times since I’ve been back on campus. It’s been “good”, “fun” or “unreal” depending on who was asking. Indeed I had a really good time last weekend, especially since I had the relief of having completed all of my midterms. However, upon my return I have had trouble getting my schoolwork done. My workload pre to post break has diminished significantly, and as a result I’ve pushed a lot it off.

Something interesting I noticed while I was home was how little time I spent online. I don’t have one particular theory as to why that was, but spending a lot of time with friends and family was definitely a factor. Consequently, upon returning to school, I’ve increased my computer/phone use, probably a result of me making up for lost time. This has probably played a role in my procrastination.

Hopefully I can get out of this funk soon and get my life back on track.

What a typical Sunday afternoon. After waking up late, I’ve spent most of my day on the internet finding new and interesting ways to avoid doing my homework. Although we had the luxury of a three day week, because of Midterms, I don’t actually feel like I’ve had much of a break. As a result, I’m lacking the necessary resolve that would allow to tackle my homework efficiently. I’m not technological determinist, I try to take accountability for my actions, and I don’t believe that the internet is what is distracting me from my work. I do however believe that internet gives me more interesting ways to distract myself.

If you mindlessly surf the internet, it really can be a black hole of information. That having been said, it’s can also be a powerful tool. Reflecting on my day today, I’ve realized that I’ve been able to learn so much from the giant ‘free’ resource that we call internet. From learning the guitar through online videos, to becoming a huge spoken word poetry fan by subscribing some of my favourite poets on youtube, to getting twitter just to follow a hip hop artist, I’ve discovered many of my favourite hobbies on the web.

I honestly think that the internet gets a bad rap. Instead of blaming the internet for being a huge distraction, we should cherish it for what it is: an unlimited resource.

This last weekend, I went to visit a friend at Cornell.  I sat in on a bunch of classes and noticed that Middlebury and Cornell have some differences and similarities in media use while in class.  I found that at a bigger school like Cornell, where most of the classes that I went to were over 200 kids, there was a lot more digital media use in distracted ways.  Middlebury students definitely use laptops and phones in class, but they definitely aren’t as distracted by their technology as Cornell kids were.   I believe this has to do with the class size and how it can be much harder for the professor at Cornell to maintain attention in such a large size class room.  I believe the class size at Middlebury is more conducive to learning than at Cornell, but still digital media can be a major distraction everywhere.  Sitting in on a big lecture was an interesting experience because I was able to observe that there were some kids that were paying attention and some kids that weren’t.  It goes to show that you can definitely learn something if you want to learn something.  I saw kids playing games on their computers, which was interesting because if you go to a big lecture like that where the teacher doesn’t know or care if you show up, than why do you even show up at all.  At Middlebury it is more important to go to class and get involved because not all the professors post their notes online and many of them take attendance and care to if people don’t show up or not. It would be nice to have some sort of balance between the two types of schools.

This past weekend for fall break, I traveled to the University of Maryland. As I headed there, I didn’t know what to expect. The school is very different than Middlebury, with over 22,000 students and being located only twenty minutes outside of Washington D.C. Surprisingly, I really liked the school and the atmosphere.The campus was very pretty with all brick buildings and I did not feel like it was too crowded. The sport’s facilities were huge and very nice. When I was younger, I always wanted to go to a school with D1 sport’s teams where the student section was huge and the teams were dominant. As I grew up, I realized that I liked smaller schools better, but it was still nice to be able to see what my old “ideal school” would have been like. One major difference between Maryland and here was the amount of diversity. Forty percent of the student population is non-white and there was a very noticeable difference from the population here at Middlebury. Also the food selection was very different. In the main food court there were places like McDonalds, Sbarro, Auntie Anne’s, Panda Express, and Chick-fil-A. If you took a ten minute walk away from campus, you came to a strip of restaurants and bars. The strip included pizza places, Chipotle, as well as my personal favorite ColdStone. Even though I really enjoyed switching it up a little and eating more mainstream, I am very thankful that Middlebury does not have these options. I enjoy being able to eat meals from the dining hall rather than pay for food and consume an enormous amount of calories every meal. Overall, I really enjoyed my trip and I would love to go back. However, I definitely made the right choice in coming to Middlebury.

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My father recently sent me this Op-Ed piece from the New York Times about the collapse of education in the United States. I found this article to be particularly interesting. As I was reading about how the United States has drastically fallen behind in almost every aspect of education, I couldn’t help but ponder about how I felt about the situation. As a American college student pursuing higher education, am I helping to sway this trend? Probably not. I am but a single drop of water in a rainstorm. The real problem resides in our society and its culture. We have become lazy. Whether it is reading Sparknotes or copying your math homework from a friend, academic laziness is rampant. Technology has largely contributed to this.

Digital media and all its aspects have given our youth a massive vice by which to procrastinate. Even as I write this blog, I am constantly tempted to open up a new tab and check Facebook. (Resist it! Don’t give in to your temptations.) On the other hand, technology also has a massive beneficial potential for education. It allows for asynchronous communication between professor and student. It allows for the use of calculating functions on programs like Excel. It has revolutionized the old status quo of doing everything from writing a research paper to coordinating schedules for working on a group assignment with a classmate.

I feel that the United States must take advantage of the beneficial aspects of education technology. Many of our schools lack technology and their students pay the price. We must reform our education system and make the development of well-rounded students our priority. I believe the key to solving the procrastination problem our students face is to make the benefits of using technology more rewarding (ie: making educational tools more fun).

I have two cousins in elementary school (3rd and 5th grade). They are very bright, but I fear that they are too attracted to playing video games and the internet that they may fall behind in the future. For the sake of our children and our nation as a whole, we need to revamp our education system. This starts with the revision of technology use in the classroom.

I went to New York for the break, how about you guys?

I just met up with some old pals from Hong Kong who are also going to uni around New York. Now I am severely behind work and trying to catch up right now! Apart from reading “Beyond Technology”, I haven’t been doing much work wise.

I was going to go back to New York this weekend again because my parents and my little sister are coming to do their “college tour”. However, plans have changed, and they probably won’t be coming.

The art of traveling usually depends on apps and 4G, but the beautiful thing about not having a smart phone is trying to get around without those things. This fall break, I visited a very good friend of mine who goes to school in Boston. To get there, of course, I reserved my tickets online, but the rest was up to me. The bus dropped us off around the corner from South Station, where I depended on instructions from my friend that I had jotted down and the good nature of Bostonians (joke) to get to where I was going. Though people in the city especially up North aren’t known to be super friendly, I managed to meet a few people as I navigated the subway. It was engaging – checking the maps, finding the right station, looking at street signs and such. I got there speedily and efficiently without any GPS! That was relatively easy. As the weekend progressed, I started to understand Boston because I had to plan out how to get places. Instead of having directions laid out for me, I had to be able to tell my friend where I was, find a place that was convenient to meet up, and get there. That was the real challenge, but it made me know Boston better.

It reminded me of when I first started driving versus when I started driving without a smart phone. For the first two years I had my license, I depended on my phone to get around my own city. This past summer, however, I had to actually learn where things were. I started to notice where places connected and where friends’ houses were in relation to each other. I’m not known for having a great sense of direction, so I needed a bit of a push to actually know where I was going. Which, I guess, is part of the reason I decided to stay dumb with my phone choice.

My fall break involved a reconnection with all the digital media I have been missing out on due to school work and football. Although the football schedule cut into my free time this weekend, Monday turned out to be a full day with no commitments. After sleeping in until noon, the day began off with an intense period of Fifa. Some friends and I spent approximately three straight hours playing Fifa, mixed in with eating Chinese food and donuts. Needless to say, it was not an especially healthy way to spend a Monday, but it felt so right. After those three hours, we finally moved on to the next digital activity: Netflix. I have been to busy to catch any of my favorite shows over the past month of school, so it was binge time on Netflix. We cruised through two hours of Family guy with ease, stopping only for dinner. Once we finished dinner, we returned once more to the cave. Picking up a couple more friends, the environment got even more competitive. Cycling through Fifa, NHL, and NHL arcade, the testosterone filled room could be heard throughout the hallway whenever a big play was made, luckily no one was in the hallway to be disturbed.

Besides video games and Netflix, I also caught up on music. During the summer when I have plenty of free time, I am usually able to search through the internet for new music to add to my iTunes. Obviously, I haven’t had that free time at school, so I was very behind. Thus, during break I found some time to find  new songs which was enjoyable.

Overall, fall break was a really nice time to step back from the stress of academic life by being disgustingly lazy and a total bum.

There is so much that I could write about the past 92 hours, aka our long weekend for fall break.  I could tell you how exciting it was to see all my friends again for the first time, how amazing it felt to sleep in my own bed, or how great my mom’s cooking tasted after eating dining hall food for a month and a half.  But there are three big moments that stand out in my mind from this weekend:

1)    Head of the Charles.  This is the largest crew race in the world, and hundreds of teams come to Boston to participate in the international race along the Charles River.  My high school team, Arlington-Belmont, had three boats in the race on Sunday. I stood on the Eliot Bridge with 50+ other members of the team – some alumni, though mostly juniors and seniors still on the team, and the new freshmen rowers.  As our boats passed through the bridge, we had a “calm before the storm.”  All fifty of us were dead silent, acting like any other fan on the bridge.  As soon as we saw the bow of our boat come through, our team erupted in cheering.  The race headquarters announced over the loudspeaker that we were the loudest team on the water the entire weekend.  People heard us from another bridge further down the river.  We all lost our voices, but it was completely worth it.  Though I’m trying to convey just how special this moment was, words honestly cannot describe how we all felt.  That team is my family, and I now know that they always will be.

2)    Leaving.  The last thing I did on Monday night was say goodbye to my best friend’s family.  We ended up standing on their porch for a while and just talking about life – college classes, how I absolutely hate hiking, how they’re going to “turn me into a hiker,” etc.  Even though it was only about 10 minutes of my entire weekend, it was the moment that meant the most.  Standing with four people that love me just as much as I love them, I was reminded that I wasn’t the only one who had missed the times when we were together.  Just like when I left in August, I had started to convince myself that I was more upset to be leaving than anyone else.  But I saw just how much I mean to this family and it made me even more thankful to have them in my life.

3)    The Present Moment.  This was an incredible weekend with all of my friends (four of my Midd friends came with me, and I got to see every one of my friends from back home).  So nothing could go wrong, right?  Nope.  I am currently writing to you from a Mazda dealer’s Customer Lounge in Lowell, Massachusetts.  Not more than 40 minutes after leaving my house, my friend’s car lurched and two warning lights came on.  We immediately got off the highway and saw that transmission fluid was also leaking from the car.  Soooo we called Triple A (YEAAAH first time using my membership whaddup).  A tow truck showed up and I rode on a four-lane highway on my friend’s lap to the Mazda dealer, leaving three of our friends at a Dunkin Donuts in the town over.  So now we wait.  We have to wait 5 hours for the car to be fixed, had to call our coach to cancel practice this afternoon, and turned a 3 1/2 hour trip into a 10 hour mess.  Can you say Orientation Week story for next year’s freshmen!?  Yeah basically.

And to relate this to media… Moments 1 and 2 of my weekend were completely technology-free, which made them so much more special.  Actually, most of my weekend was technology free because I just didn’t have time to look at my phone with all that was going on.  But at the end of the day, if we didn’t have technology to call all our parents and Triple A, I probably wouldn’t make it to Midd until tomorrow.  So I’m pretty glad we have those things called iPhones.