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In our experience, if students are not able to find answers to an Internet search in the first few results pages, they say “I can’t find it,” instead of adjusting their search, or reexamining the results in depth.

As teachers, it is important that we realize that we appreciate the convenience of the Internet because we see it through a different lens than our students.

Math lesson time. Math scores: Manitoba, 468; Yukon, 469; Newfoundland and Labrador, 472; Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, each 474. That's five provinces within 1.2 percentage points of each other. Put another way: Billy got 80 per cent on his test. Sally got 81 per cent on her test. Math lesson, part two: The creators of this test, the Council of Ministers of Education, rightly points out that the margin of error on these scores is greater than the differences in these scores. In plain English, that means that the statisticians who crunch the data are saying that the scores are basically equivalent.

Manitoba remains the child-poverty capital of Canada

Math lesson, part three: Manitoba was the only jurisdiction in Canada to have 100 per cent of the selected schools do the PCAP assessment.

"Isolation leads to frustration."

You hear two opinions from experts on the topic of what happens when kids are perpetually exposed to technology. One: Constant multitasking makes teens work harder, reduces their focus, and screws up their sleep. Two: Using technology as a youth helps students adapt to a changing world in a way that will benefit them when they eventually have to live and work in it. Either of these might be true. More likely, they both are. But it is certainly the case that these kids are different—fundamentally and permanently different—from previous generations in ways that are sometimes surreal, as if you'd walked into a room where everyone is eating with his feet.

It's as if Beatlemania junkies in 1966 had had the ability to demand "Rain" be given as much radio time as "Paperback Writer," and John Lennon thought to tell everyone what a good idea that was. The fan–celebrity relationship has been so radically transformed that even sending reams of obsessive fan mail seems impersonal.

The teens' brains move just as quickly as teenage brains have always moved, constructing real human personalities, managing them, reaching out to meet others who might feel the same way or want the same things. Only, and here's the part that starts to seem very strange—they do all this virtually. Sitting next to friends, staring at screens, waiting for the return on investment. Everyone so together that they're actually all apart.