Welcome back to Term 3.
It was wonderful to see so many smiley faces last week and to sense our students’ joy in re-connecting with friends. This is an exciting term for us as site preparations commence next week on four new classrooms on the primary campus and we look forward to preparations for an additional two classrooms on the senior campus overlooking the Denison Street oval.
Whilst our students were enjoying a few extra days break, Christian Education National teachers from around Tasmania were gathering in Hobart for the annual CEN Tas State Conference. The title of the conference was ‘Flourishing in a Digital Age’ and our guest speakers encouraged us to consider the challenges and opportunities of teaching in Christian schools in this increasingly digitally connected era. As a parent and a teacher, some of the insights were sobering.
Keynote speaker, Daniel Sih, pointed to a recent report from the Surgeon General in the United States (2023) that “youth that spend more than three-hours per day on social media face double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes”. The same report indicated that young people are, on average, spending 3.5 hours a day on social media.
“ ...there was a simple reminder of the need to slow down, to unplug to allow ourselves to think...”
We know from Australian research that many teenagers are not getting enough sleep and that there seems to be a general decline in the number of hours of sleep now compared to previous generations. An Australia Government Report “Growing Up In Australia” (2018) highlighted “later bed times caused by increased use of technology and other changes associated with busy, modern lifestyles” as key reasons for these changes.
As parents, we may be keenly aware of the issues but how do we start to build purposeful habits for ourselves and our children? Daniel Sih encouraged us to consider time (and our use of it) as both a physical and a spiritual reality that has impact on our physical, spiritual, and socio emotional wellbeing. Digital overuse, he reminded us, can lead to the point where we become less happy and certainly less healthy in both our physical and spiritual lives. In contrast to the encouragement to always be connected there was a simple reminder of the need to slow down, to unplug to allow ourselves to think, and to consider what a digital sabbath might look like for us in our increasingly busy lives.
As a young man (many decades ago) armed with my electric typewriter, I was so content with this piece of technology and what it could do, I can remember thinking “I’m never going to need a computer”. How wrong I was. Life and the technology available to us has changed in many ways so that the lives of our children seem so different to previous eras. However, God reminds us that He is constant and the need to manage our time and the things we expose ourselves (and our children) to is nothing new. The author of the Proverbs reminds us “above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life”. Simply because the technology has changed, does not mean that we are somehow going to make better decisions. In fact, we need to be attentive to our own and our children’s physical, spiritual wellbeing and relationships as we continue to grow into the pattern of Jesus.
Scott Ambrose - Principal