Students in Shannon Meyer’s 10th-grade class tried to go a week without using electronics.

From the LA Times:

 Cesar Rodriguez knew he was addicted to electronic devices. But the Los Angeles 10th-grader had no idea just how sick he was.

“I can’t stand it,” he wrote in his journal on the second day of a one-week attempt to survive without television, iPods, cellphones, BlackBerrys and computers. “I woke up last night but I was still kind of asleep and I was having a dream about my phone and I started to bang my head against the pillow. I AM GOING CRAZY!!!”
On Tuesday, which happened to be day seven of the great experiment, I visited the still-shaky Rodriguez and the rest of Shannon Meyer’s unplugged homeroom students at their downtown charter, the California Academy for Liberal Studies Early College High School.

Detox hasn’t been easy for these BlackBerry babies. They were born into a digital world of wireless links, with headphones where their ears should have been. Meyer, trying to teach them something about true connectedness and solitary reflection, asked them to go cold turkey and take notes. With pen and paper…

Thats the one thing that I find crazy… I’m a late generation Xer and  as digitally connected as most, but I can still remember the time when we didn’t have all of this at our fingertips… I still remember cats with Zach Morris/Micheal Douglas cell phone

and this beeper

with seeing how far things have come in the last 10 years, I can’t even imagine how much fun it would be to grow up right now; to be like 12 years old in a world where iphones, blackberry, and google are omnipresent and the interweb dominates just about everything in the modernized parts of the planet; we are in a really good time … anyways more from the LA Times story:

…Midway through the experiment, Meyer — who is of the radical opinion that students and others should spend less time with electronic gadgets and more time reading old-fashioned newspapers — had e-mailed me a progress report.

“We are all going crazy,” she said. It seemed to me a little unsporting that she was e-mailing me despite having joined in the media fast herself, but she explained that she was making an exception only to answer work-related e-mails. As to the upside: “I think some of the kids have discovered they have younger brothers and sisters,” she wrote.

Andres Lopez told me he’d been so bored he went to a barber and had his shaggy locks shorn, “Just to fill the void.”

Jose Alvarez said he had tried Pilates and something even more exotic: “I cleaned my room.”

Mario Canaba was turned so upside down, he actually played with some of his mother’s day-care kids, but described the experience in a single word: “Painful.”

Angie Gaytan lost track of the days and had a strange episode of disorientation in which she found herself staring at a piece of chicken

“I felt weird and out of order,” Valerie Lira wrote in describing the experience of waking up and not turning on the television.

Rodriguez, confessing the media fast was “the hardest thing I have ever had to do,” drank a lot of water, like a man trying to make it across a desert. At his lowest point, trying desperately to kill time, he accidentally broke a lamp.

“I was playing soccer in my living room,” he said.

NIIIIICE!!!

Nine of the 22 students raised a hand when I asked for confessions from those who had cracked at least once. Of those nine, most transgressions were not premeditated. Some reached without thinking for iPhones, or they checked text messages — especially early in the week — like worms that keep wiggling after being separated from their heads.

Jesus Alonzo was entirely up-front about the moment he broke. He was at a cousin’s house, he said, when the championship boxing match between Manny Pacquiao and Ricky Hatton flashed onto the TV screen.

“Then I cracked,” Alonzo wrote in his journal. “I had to watch the fight. It was a short fight, though.”

Kim Figueroa’s surrender wasn’t pretty either.

“I was left alone,” she said of the predicament she found herself in at home, no relatives around, deafening silence, the walls closing in.

Without a trace of guilt, she reached for the remote and clicked on the TV. And once she was under the spell of that pulsing blue haze, she couldn’t turn back.

I dont even think I could go a couple of hours, let alone a week with out electronic devices… I guess its a good thing I’m a grown up and don’t have to. Maybe, I could do without everything as long as I get access to the blackberry for like an hour a day. What can’t you do without?

read the rest of the story here at LA Times.com