When River Hill High School 10th-grader Kelsey Balimtas sits down to do her homework, her cell phone and computer are always right in front of her. She would like to stay completely focused on the textbook, but honestly, she says, she just can't.
Her cell phone calls to her with an irresistible buzz she can't ignore. She bounces from homework to text message to Facebook and back to homework. "I think the quality of my homework is decreased," she admitted.
And so do college professors and high school teachers, who say this constantly plugged-in generation is less able to focus on subjects that take deep concentration. They see students who are smart but can't write long papers very well; students who have more trouble paying attention in longer class periods and students who are disorganized. Their observations are supported by more than just anecdotes from the classroom; brain research shows that it is difficult to do many things at the same time.
"They are constantly jumping from one thing to another. They can't sit still long enough," said Ilona McGuiness, dean of first-year students and academic services at Loyola College. "You can't think through problems. You can't process. You can't develop the deep thinking skills."
Such is the life of the normal high school and college student these days, a generation that doesn't remember when the "house phone" was simply the only phone or when research was done at the library.
They are always plugged in to some form of technology: an iPod, a computer, a cell phone or a BlackBerry - and sometimes all of them at once.
In that way, Balimtas is a normal high school student except that she is mature enough to realize that she may not be as efficient when she is plugged into all her devices at once. That hasn't changed her behavior or that of her friends, who admit to having a love affair with their gadgets.
"If my phone breaks for a couple of days, I begin to feel weird," said Theresa Russell, a ninth-grader at the Howard County school.
"My girlfriend goes to this school, and we text 50 times a day," said Matthew Moore, a 10th-grader who stopped momentarily during an interview to check his phone and see who had just sent him a text message. Moore and other students say they are so used to sending messages on their phones that they prefer it to speaking to friends on the phone because it takes less time.
They say there aren't many minutes in a day when they stay unplugged from their social network; although Balimtas said her mother has begun intervening by putting her daughter's phone on "house arrest."
Recent brain research conducted by Marcel Just at Carnegie Mellon University showed that multitasking may be more difficult than we think.
The Carnegie Mellon study used brain imaging to show that when people talked on a cell phone the brain activity that is connected to driving a car diminishes by nearly 40 percent, making it more likely those drivers will not perform as well on the road. The study had volunteers simulate driving while inside an MRI brain scanner. They were then asked questions they had to respond to.
Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, said the research indicates that it is difficult for the human brain to operate at maximum effectiveness while doing several tasks. The distracting task, he said, draws away power, creating something like a brown-out in the brain.
"If you are solving a hard physics problem, maybe that is not the time to listen to your iPod," Just said.
Studies have indicated, he said, that the brain processes language automatically. So when a person hears someone talking, he or she can't shut it out.
The most motivated students instinctively figure out they can't do that physics problem while listening to hard rock and simply take out their ear buds, he said.
But changing the behavior may not be instinctive. Loyola's McGuiness said students who come to her with academic problems often have to be told, "Hey, look what is happening here."
"We tell them they need to put themselves in an environment where they will not be interrupted," she said. The challenge for young people today, she maintains, is learning to limit their use of technology.
"You have to teach them to manage these things," she said.
McGuiness said she began seeing a change in students about five years ago. She and other teachers say the students seem to become fidgety when they are out of communication with their friends. When she walks down the halls today, she said, she sees students rush out of class and immediately flip open their phones. "They are in the habit of doing things in short bursts," she said.
Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson, a Johns Hopkins University lecturer who wrote an article for the Johns Hopkins Magazine on the subject of multitasking, said she saw the problem surface about two years ago, particularly in her larger classes of 20 and 30 students who were trying to use technology secretly.
In one class, she told the students that if she found them surfing the Internet on their laptops, she would ask them to leave the classroom. "The next class period, all the laptops disappeared," she said in an interview. "It was almost like they couldn't trust themselves."
The constant use of quick-hit technology, she thinks, has made some students appear almost zoned-out in classes. She also finds they are more forgetful and have difficulty completing assignments.
"I saw that students have little tolerance for anything that doesn't have the split-second image splashing pace of a Spike TV commercial or an Internet pop up ad," she wrote in the magazine piece.
She has tried to make her students aware of their addiction to gadgetry and once brought in a yoga instructor to try to get them to understand the importance of solitude and quiet.
Teachers say they have to change their techniques to keep students - whether they are Hopkins undergrads or students at Northeast High School in Anne Arundel County - engaged and entertained. "I almost end up teaching them Oprah-style," said Simpson.
Sandra LePori-Myers, a business education teacher at Northeast, puts it another way: "Everything is visual with them. You have to be a monkey in front of the classroom these days."
LePori-Myers says that with all its downsides, the technology has more positives. Students, she said, are connected to an amazing wealth of information they never had access to before.
Teachers say students today are able to multitask more effectively than their parents or grandparents. Some students even say it is beneficial.
Russell, the River Hill student, likes doing many things at once. She said listening to music helps her concentrate on other work.
Rick Robb, a 12th-grade English teacher at River Hill, has noted the changes in students in his Advanced Placement and gifted-and-talented classes. "I have some of the brightest in the country," he said, but they don't have the same ability to analyze literature. What they lack, he said, "is the patience for delving into the multilevels of the text."
But Robb isn't sure technology is the culprit. He believes this new generation is more interested in "the product than the process" of education. They are driven to get good grades and high SAT scores, he said, but are not as interested in the process of learning.
Most high schools are trying to control the use of technology and have forbidden students from having cell phones or iPods on during the school day.
Barbara Walker, the principal of Pikesville High School in Baltimore County, said teachers confiscate cell phones when they catch students with them.
The parent must then come in to the school office and pick up the phone, an inconvenience most parents don't want to put up with more than once.
But Robb and Walker said it is difficult to catch students because they have become so adept at hiding the phones. "It is amazing how they can have the phone on their lap and text message while they are looking at the teacher," she said. Others are able to text with their cell phones in their pants pockets.
Walker wonders about how the technology may be changing interpersonal relationships as well. As soon as the last bell rings, she said, the cell phones come out. "A good half of them are on the phone when they pass me," she said. "You are standing in a sea of a thousand kids, but you are really isolated. You are talking to one person."
Not every student is plugged in or claims to enjoy it. At River Hill, John Linkous, a 10th-grader, said he doesn't like to text: "I can't do everything at once."
His friends joke that he is a freak.
They are so plugged-in that when they were asked if they could actually do without their gadgets for a week, they looked alarmed. "I could do it if there was money involved," Moore said.
"If I had a stack of books this high," said Russell, who held her hands two feet apart.
liz.bowie@baltsun.com