Bette Midler tried to slam teens for looking at their phones at an art museum

Is technology ruining our view of the world? Are we spending so much time with our faces in our phones that we miss what's going on around us? Are the teens so invested in their Facebooks and Insta-whatsits that they're missing out on arts and culture because they're so invested in their technadoodles? Not necessarily. We actually can't know technology is making someone miss out on an experience if we don't know what that person's experience is.

Bette Midler recently posted a photo of three teens sitting on a bench at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were all looking at their phones with their backs to the painting "Aegina Visited by Jupiter" by 18-th century artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze.

Midler asked Twitter, "What's wrong with this picture?"


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Two teens got called out for making a TikTok video after a car crash, but they say it helped them 'cope'

Can the teens do literally anything without being blasted? Apparently not...

Katie Cornetti and Marissa Bordas, two Pittsburgh teens, were involved in a car crash. After taking a sharp turn on a winding road, the car flipped twice, then landed on its side. The girls said later on that they weren't on their phones at the time. The cause of the crash was because the tires on Bordas' car were mounted improperly.

The girls were wearing their seatbelts and were fine, aside from a few bruises. However, they were trapped in the car for about 20 minutes, so to pass the time while they waited for help, they decided to make a TikTok video. They made sure they were totally fine before they started recording.

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'No Phones, New Friends Friday' school lunch policy is making teens kinder — and less lonely

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When Iowa Valley Junior-Senior High School principal Janet Behrens observed her students in the cafeteria, she was dismayed to see that they spent more time looking down at their phones than they did looking at and interacting with each other. So last year, she implemented a new policy that's having a big impact.

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Teacher's viral 'baggage activity' brought her students to tears

What a beautiful idea.

Karen Wunderlich Loewe/Facebook

Update from the author: I wrote a follow-up to this article sharing a trauma-informed perspective of the activity. You can read it here.

Karen Loewe has been teaching for 22 years. Clearly, all of that experience has given her a solid bead on what her students really need.

The middle school English teacher from Oklahoma shared an activity she did with her students for the first day of school on Facebook and it's gone insanely viral. In just three days, her post has already been shared more than 335,000 times.

What has caught people's attention is something we all have in common—emotional baggage. We live in an era of rising mental health awareness, but also increased social pressures to appear as if you have all of your sh*t together. For kids in the turbulent middle school years, whose their bodies, minds, and spirits are growing at breakneck pace, having a place to share their emotional turmoil can be incredibly helpful. But many kids don't have a safe, supportive place to do that.

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