(Some) students can survive a week without electronics

Cesar Rodriguez knew he was addicted to electronic devices. But the Los Angeles 10th-grader had no idea just how sick he was.

"I can't stand it," he wrote in his journal on the second day of a one-week attempt to survive without television, iPods, cellphones, BlackBerrys and computers. "I woke up last night but I was still kind of asleep and I was having a dream about my phone and I started to bang my head against the pillow. I AM GOING CRAZY!!!"

On Tuesday, which happened to be day seven of the great experiment, I visited the still-shaky Rodriguez and the rest of Shannon Meyer's unplugged homeroom students at their downtown charter, the California Academy for Liberal Studies Early College High School.

Detox hasn't been easy for these BlackBerry babies. They were born into a digital world of wireless links, with headphones where their ears should have been. Meyer, trying to teach them something about true connectedness and solitary reflection, asked them to go cold turkey and take notes. With pen and paper...

"I felt weird and out of order," Valerie Lira wrote in describing the experience of waking up and not turning on the television...

Lopez actually communicated with an uncle during a rare conversation about swine flu, politics and history.

Jenny Corona connected with her autistic brother, and, to her utter amazement, read an entire Harry Potter book in four days.

Without her headphones blocking out the real world, Flor Salvador heard strange chirping sounds.

"I didn't know we had birds!" she wrote in her journal...

The rest of the story is at the L.A. Times. Via Whybird.