This week I’ve visited the Uxbridge Music Hall a lot. We were moving staging, lights, props and actors into the facility for performances of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, Dec. 13-16. On Monday, as director Conrad Boyce and I opened the front door of the Hall to move a piece of furniture onto the stage, Benny, the custodian, greeted us with a big smile and handshakes.
“Isn’t it great? We don’t have to do this anymore,” and he mimicked avoiding somebody on the sidewalk the way we did during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It is great,” I agreed. “But we almost have to learn how to deal with people face-to-face all over again.”
I’m sure I don’t have to elaborate, but aside from the horrific totals – 56,534 COVID-19 deaths and nearly five million cases in Canada – perhaps the worst damage the pandemic has wrought is disconnection. For three years we didn’t touch each other, we didn’t talk to each other face-to-face, we didn’t gather indoors at arenas, theatres, gyms or house parties. The impact on our mental health has been crippling.
Statistics Canada has even surveyed us to prove it. The demographers at Stats Can say, during the pandemic, population growth fell to levels we haven’t seen since the Great War. Life expectancy went down by 0.6 years, the worst since 1921.
And if you think it’s been tough on adults, it’s worse for young people. The Guardian newspaper spoke to a clinical scientist about our inability to communicate in person because of the pandemic.
“We acquire most of our social skills between the ages of zero and seven,” Linda Blair said, and she added that the absence of those social skills means they’ll be harder for us – especially for young people – to learn or re-learn them.
And you know what makes that worse? Being addicted to our cellphones. As evidence, look at the dilemma that the Toronto District School Board faces trying to eliminate the distraction of cellphones in classrooms. The TDSB banned them in 2007, and then lifted the ban in 2011. Now it’s considering re-introducting it.
Students went through two years of mind-numbing online learning, two years of staring at a computer screen instead of a teacher’s engaging lessons in class and hands-on learning. Now, with the temptation of the phone in their back pocket, kids are logging on to social media constantly, most annoyingly in class.
And you know what makes that worse? Helicopter parents who insist on hovering. I understand that moms and dads want to keep their children safe. But I also believe unless there are medical reasons for being instantaneously connected with parents at home or at work, any call at school can wait for between classes, recess or lunch period.
In other words, let’s not panic our children into thinking we have to know their whereabouts every minute at school. Schools are pretty efficient at keeping tabs on students, faculty and staff between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. And while we’re at it, why not treat cellphone time out of school like time on their game computers? Why not have them earn that time as a reward, not treat it as a given?
One high school student interviewed on CBC Radio this week said, “Too many of us are addicted to our phones. Phones don’t really promote better education.”
I coped with this problem when I taught journalism and broadcasting to undergraduate and graduate students alike at Centennial College just prior to the pandemic. Almost all my reporting students and the curriculum gurus insisted that cellphones played a pivotal role in modern journalism – chasing interview sources, acquiring research and delivering stories remotely.
“Get with it, Ted,” they told me. “It’s a wireless world.” I agreed with the predominance and pervasiveness of technology. But I knew my students better than the gurus did. Long before the pandemic, young people were petrified to make cold calls to interview sources. It was my job to help them overcome their mortal fear of leaving that cocoon at home, meeting someone they didn’t know in person and conducting an interview face-to-face to get to the heart of a story.
“Sometimes, politicians in a scrum at Queen’s Park or athletes post-game at Scotiabank Arena say more with facial expressions than they do with spoken words. And you can’t get that from a cellphone,” I insisted.
In other words, I forced the cellphones out of these young people’s hands to teach them a profession. It may be time take away their phones to teach them how to be human again, and really put the pandemic behind us.