Aimee Tawzer’s Deep Hope for English 12 at Central Christian School is that through great literature we will awaken to God's Story, courageously choose good, and become fierce awakeners of others. This FLEx story is loaded with Storyboard images, learning targets, and student reflections and voice.

All of the novels we study senior year address themes of disconnection and the importance of genuine relationships. As we have studied these novels, I encouraged the students to awaken to God's Story by applying these themes to their own lives.

To this end, our first learning target was "I can disconnect from counterfeit relationships by creating, executing, and reflecting on a personal SMART goal." To meet this target students were Idolatry Discerners as they intentionally disconnected from technology in order to reconnect with a relationship of their choice. After a set period of time, students reflected on the outcome of this SMART goal on our class blog.

This led to our most recent FLEx. The learning target for this FLEx was "I can reconnect real relationships by creating and sharing a podcast that invites others to disconnect from counterfeit relationships." Our class usually concludes novel units with a final discussion. I took this format and adapted it to design a FLEx where the students created a podcast synthesizing the themes of the novels read thus far this year and shared their experience with living out their SMART goals.

Below, enjoy reflections from a couple of students on their FLEx experience:

Clay: Technology is a great tool for humanity, but it can never be a replacement for our humanity or relationships. It’s really not that hard. You need to just get off your phone, go outside and touch grass, make friends, even have conversations with your parents or siblings, people that are living in the same house as you. To give a personal experience, I'd say for most of junior year I didn't talk to my parents other than necessary. I lost my relationship with my dad because he has work, and then also with my mom. I was homeschooled for most of my life so that had never happened before. That was the primary relationship in my life that I had experienced for so long and it was gone. It took me a year to figure out why it felt so wrong, but I realized that it's because I had lost those relationships. I had turned to my phone which was not a good replacement at all. I mean TV as well but any kind of social media or anything technological is not a good replacement for relationships. I had to find out the hard way. What I did to change things at the beginning of this year, was force myself to just leave my phone in my room after school, especially for the first month, so I could get back on track. I wouldn’t touch it until right before I went to bed. I just spent time with my family, including both of my brothers because you have to have those relationships, and just have simple conversations. It's not that hard to talk about what you did that day. It might not always seem important but especially to your parents it is more important than you think, especially in the long run.

Taylor: I agree with Clay.  I definitely had a life-changing experience with this throughout middle school and high school. I definitely developed an addiction to my phone and I always felt the need to keep up with people, keep in tune with people, see what people are doing. It really caused tensions with my family members, and it made me lose out on some really important moments with my family. I didn't realize that the relationships and keeping up with people on my phone were counterfeit relationships. I was missing what was in front of me. For Thanksgiving break we took a trip, and I would usually have been more focused on posting what I was doing or Face Timing my friends back home, but I really took a step back, set my phone down, and spent those important moments with my family. It didn't go unnoticed. I definitely got feedback and comments from my family like “Wow, Taylor, you're really spending time off your phone.” It made me feel proud of myself that I was able to conquer that addiction. My family and friends started to notice and through that, I also started focusing more on my schoolwork. When I got home I would just be on my phone. I would tell my parents I didn't have homework when I definitely did have homework so that I could keep up with my friends on my phone. Not until recently did I realize that was really unhealthy for me and I needed to step back and maintain those real relationships in my life and not cloud my headspace with what's on my phone, who's Snapchatting me, what's the newest Instagram ad. Through my experience I encourage every single one of you to disconnect with technology and see what you're truly missing out on, and you just might shock yourself with what you're missing right in front of you with people who really truly care about you because people who are on your phone and people who use Snapchat don't care about your personal life. They don't care and so I think the cautionary tale of these three novels is that technology can separate us and make us forget Humanity.  Technology really separated me from my family and real relationships and replaced it with a false sense of reality. I truly believe that stepping back from those counterfeit relationships and re-engaging with the real people in my life changed my life completely. I definitely noticed I was way happier all of a sudden reconnecting with people.