"'You smell something, Rabbit?' (sniff, sniff) 'Fear'" -Super Troopers (2001)
In the past few months I've been using a slide on "FOMO" to make a point to teachers that we can't stop our students from using social media by just wagging our finger and telling them to stop. After all, fear is a powerful motivator, and it drives teenage behavior more than we realize. In high schools, fear of a failing grade or not getting into college motivates students to complete their work. Online, fear of missing out drives teenagers to obsess, gossip, insult and shame one another.
Fear in School
At my school, a lot of my colleagues and I worry that high school is starting to look a lot less like the high schools we attended and a lot more like "pre-college." Increasingly, students see high school as a necessary step to get into a selective college, rather than a place to learn and grow. Students (and parents) are putting more and more pressure on themselves earlier in their academic career to get good grades and complete the extracurricular activities that look good on a college transcript. As a result, they're incredibly motivated by achieving a high GPA, taking AP level courses, and choosing extracurricular activities that colleges will look upon favorably. For example, in a recent report The College Board noted, "the number of students who graduate from high school having taken rigorous AP courses has nearly doubled, and the number of low-income students taking AP has more than quadrupled." The uptick in "rigorous" courses does nothing to quell students' obsession with their GPAs, which in turn are losing meaning thanks to weighting and grade inflation.
The heightened focus on grades, APs, and standardized testing is especially visible in private schools. At these schools, new technology perpetuates students' tendency to see themselves as numbers and compare themselves to others. Online gradebooks literally attach a number (to the nearest hundredth of a decimal at my school) to every student in every class. Naviance, used by our college counseling office, literally attaches a GPA and SAT score to each student to compare him or her to past applicants on a scatter plot graph. Inevitably, this means that students work hard in school out of fear of their numbers going down.
The real problem of using fear as a motivator is that it's bad practice for teaching and learning. Students learn best when they're curious, not when they're fearful. Teachers teach best when they use their time prepping interesting classes and meeting with students, not grading. Maturity, self-discovery and retention don't improve at the same rate when students feel fearful in school and when doing school work.
Fear in Social Media
When transitioning from student to teenager our adolescents find themselves motivated by fear. In this capacity it's not a number on the transcript that they're worried about, but the number of likes on an Instagram, Twitter or Facebook post, or views on a Snapchat story. Our students are addicted to their screens. I've written about this before. Common Sense Media claims that teens spend almost 9 hours (8:56) a day not including school or homework on screens. One of the principal reasons for this is that there's so much happening online--particularly in social media spaces--and teenagers feel pressured to stay up-to-date with what's happening in their communities. That's where the concept of FOMO originates; it's the fear of missing out on something occurring in that space.
Fear is bad for social interactions on- and off-line in the same way it's bad for teaching and learning. FOMO drives teenagers to meticulously document all of their favorite social interactions to prove that they aren't missing out on anything. Inevitably, that means there is a group on the outside that is "missing out" on something. How teenagers respond to these posts defines relationships and social norms. It's why they obsessively check their phones for social updates, why they bully one another online, and it's why they seek affirmation through online interactions. Of course, this happens online and offline. But social media is ever-present and particularly conducive to these problems. It attaches a number to each post, and it allows others to hide behind their screens when interacting, which leads to posts, comments and editing that compound tough teenager interactions.
Being a teenager is tough enough. Let's work to find ways to limit or remove fear as an emotional state and a motivator to act and interact on and offline.
