Nicholas Carr wrote an article in the Atlantic Magazine during the summer of 2008 which made the rounds in educational circles as we started school that fall.  “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was the fuel for many  interesting discussions and speculation. This article is an underlying premise for Carr’s book, The Shallows, published this summer. Have you noticed that you have trouble reading for a sustained period of time at a very deep level? Do your eyes interact with text differently than they used to? I can answer yes to both of those questions and The Shallows helped me understand the change.

Though I can’t begin to even scrape the surface of the topics covered in this book, Carr touches on the malleable nature of the human brain and its ability to literally rewire itself after a series of surprisingly few repeated experiences. This is of great importance to teachers of course, as the brains of the young people before us each day in class are not the same brains we were teaching even five years ago. How are we to alter instruction to best meet the real and physical needs of today’s students? Is it important to shut down technology for certain parts of the day to assure that students are able to think deeply and enable their brains to retain that capacity?

This book is an interesting read for everyone, but crucial a one for those who work in education.