Hope's article review

Love this article review Hope did for school as "Letter To The Editor"...

September 18, 2014

Letter to the Editor

Newsela.com

How many times have you looked around and seen people engrossed in their electronics? At parks, malls, parties, and stores I’ve seen people completely absorbed by their phones. It’s not only annoying, but it’s becoming an unhealthy addiction. And some of the consequences of people being on their phone too often are they lose their ability to connect with people.

There’s not just one consequence though, there are many that follow for being on your phone too often. First of all, you don’t get enough exercise. You don’t burn as much calories by sitting on the couch and going on social media. Secondly, kids are focusing too much on their games or other apps instead of paying attention to their grades. They’re not getting all their homework done in time or sufficiently studying for tests. Lastly, kids these days are texting or face timing people instead of talking with them face-to-face. Sure, texting people instead of actually talking to them saves time, but you don’t get to have actual meaningful conversations. In addition, more people get cyber-bullied by text or on social media than they do in school or any other place.

According to the article ‘As they text more are kids losing the ability to read each other?’ a school in California sends their sixth graders to a camp without any electronics for a week. When they get to the camp, right away they take two assessments testing their ability to read people’s expressions. In the first test, the kids were asked to determine people’s different expressions in 48 pictures of people making faces. In the second test, the kids watched a video with the sound turned off and guessed the actor’s emotions. The article states that the kids made an average of 14.02 mistakes in the facial-recognition test at the beginning of the camp. At the end of the week-long camp with no electronics they only made about 9 or fewer errors. This proves that with electronics, kids are losing the ability to connect with other people, or read their expressions, which is a big social skill you need in life.

So would you rather get good grades and go off to college or get more likes? Would you rather be healthy and active or have more posts and sit on a couch all day? Would you rather have a good relationship with your friends and talk often or text them every once in a while? The choice is yours to make.