Not long ago I taught a summer class in creative writing to middle schoolers. On one sun-drenched day, I took the class outside to wander through our campus and down to our stretch of shoreline on Narragansett Bay. Their task was to find a natural object that drew their attention—a tree, a stone, a shell—and write a descriptive poem about it. Several students took to the task earnestly, finding something sitting with it meditatively, jotting ideas in their notebooks for ten or twenty minutes at a stretch. Others absent-mindedly grabbed a leaf or rock, wrote a few words about it, and spent the rest of the period asking me when we would be finished. No doubt they resented me for making them leave their phones in the classroom.
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