The accordion door flattens shut, and with the whooshing release of the brakes the bus rumbles awake. I’m back on the job after the all-too-short holiday break, chaperoning this bus full of affluent teens as it returns them to boarding school. Living with 300 high-school students on a small brick-and-ivy campus makes me something of an expert on adolescents; I occupy the teenage trenches. As an English teacher, helping students craft better five-paragraph essays is part of my job description, but I also give them extra help in my apartment at 9 at night, keep the dorm quiet during study hours and listen to their complaints about workload, parents and college applications.

As our charter bus leaves New York behind, I become aware of a burgeoning hum. It is the hum of booting up, turning on, plugging in. Looking back into the rows of solemn teens behind me, I see spots of brightness, glowing lime green bulbs and blue LCD panels. Illuminated by laptops, the students’ faces are zombie-like, just as they appear shuffling from class to class during the school day. I look around: Discmen, laptops, handheld DVD players the size of a good book, cell phones with Hello Kitty faceplates, Palm Pilots. They are all connected: cords like IVs running from devices to ears, electronic juice flowing into brains, saturating them with entertainment. Across the aisle, I notice a senior girl plugged into a gadget I cannot see.

“What’s that?”

“An MP3 player,” she replies with a smile. She holds open her palm, exposing a silver box, no bigger than a DD battery.

“Oh.” Too embarrassed to ask what an MP3 player is (knowing that it plays music, just not how), I remark, “It’s so small.” She turns back to her miniscule entertainment box, and I look out the window, wondering how the hell you get music into something that tiny.

When I was 17 and in high school, our computer lab housed 12 Macintosh SEs, the boxy ones with the disk drive built into the front. None of them was hooked up to the Internet. As note-passing, phone-gabbing students, we had no concept of e-mail or the future of instant messaging. We weren’t even required to take a computer class. I graduated in 1995.

Now I feel old. I mean old, out of it, clueless. How could I not know exactly what an MP3 player is when my 17-year-old students know instinctively?

These “screenagers,” as they have come to be called, are the sign of a new age, a true revolution in the way technology affects humans. All of our students were born in the mid- to late-1980s (except for one freshman born in 1990) and were always surrounded by technology and multimedia. None of them has ever lived without cable; none was alive before the CD was mainstream; none has grown up in a home or school without computers or Internet. This generation of Americans is so dependent on today’s newest technology that they pity people who lived without it.

Sometimes I ask my students in English class to imagine what life was like a mere 100 years ago: no DVDs, no IM, no cell phones, no TV, no computers, no radio. The unanimous response: “That must have sucked.”

“What did they do for entertainment?” I prod them.

“Sit around,” the wise-guy volunteers.

“They read,” I say passionately, trying to get them interested in books. “They read for fun, and they talked to each other.” My students stare back at me blankly, dubiously, and I am struck by the idea that perhaps they literally can’t function without their technology. Maybe, because throughout their lives communication, entertainment and education have depended on technology, they simply don’t know how to live without it. This distresses me as both a teacher and a social creature. While technology grows increasingly dominant in our lives, how can we educate today’s tech-savvy youth about the other world—our human one—where communication, transaction and entertainment occur without electrical outlets or battery power?

Last year, my freshmen read a novel about the tensions between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. I arranged a pen-pal exchange between my students and Israeli and Palestinian youth. When I asked who wanted to have a pen-pal, only one of my 32 freshmen expressed interest. A few asked whether the Middle Eastern kids had e-mail instead. The idea of writing a letter and waiting several weeks for a response was anathema. They only want (and only know) communication that is technological and instantaneous.

My dorm hall is populated by IM junkies—this fall, a straight-D sophomore student came to me in tears, admitting that IM distracted her so much she couldn’t do her homework. But a senior named Lucy takes the cake. Every time I enter her room, she is juggling a confusing array of eight or 10 conversation bubbles. They flash and make noise with each new response, like some twisted nickel slot machine. She keeps a frenetic pace, answering one and then another, without missing a beat. It’s how she keeps in touch with her friends, both from boarding school and home. When I ask Lucy whether all those conversations aren’t distracting, she quips, “Thank god for Adderall.”

When I walk into any student’s room, 95 percent of the time she is seated at her computer. Sometimes she is typing a paper, but usually she is checking her e-mail, doing a Google search, responding to an IM, taking a break from homework to play checkers against a guy in Russia over the Internet, choosing one of her hundreds of downloaded songs to listen to or watching a DVD. Sitting in her standard-issue wooden chair, it’s all just a left-click away.

I even see media bombardment rolling through Connecticut on this clear January night. Someone has popped Bring it On in the VCR, and it plays throughout the bus. Only a few students are paying attention to the movie; most have funneled themselves into their personal electronic devices and only periodically glance up at the square screens that rattle with every bump. They are accustomed to dividing their attention between media and have learned to tune out the unimportant.

As a teacher, I wonder how to inspire screenagers. Sometimes I feel that if I am not as entertaining in class as Grand Theft Auto, a violent and popular video game, they tune out. Go into sleep mode. At the end of each trimester, students fill out teacher evaluation forms. Under the question “What would you like to see more of in this class?” several students always write “movies.”

While I think that the technological revolution has been tremendously beneficial in science, business and academia, I feel queasy about its long-term effects. My students are slaves to their media; they are incapable of setting limits when it comes to technology. Today’s media command not only time but attention as well, and I feel unsettled when I think of Lucy—and the hundreds of our students who take ADD medication—who joke about their inability to focus as they stare glassy-eyed at flashing screens.

As we turn onto School Street and pass the row of brick dormitories, kids begin to turn off laptops and stow away Discmen and MP3s. Seeing the campus, I fondly recall one night in the dorm last May. We had a terrific lightening storm, and the power had gone out on the entire campus. It was a Saturday night, and the girls were hunkered down for their weekly all-nighters of movies, phone calls and IMing. But nothing worked. When girls picked up their phones, there was only dead silence. When they tried to start their computers, the screens stayed a cold, blank gray. After several minutes of whining at me, the girls gathered in the hall with their pillows and blankets, joking, reminiscing and telling ghost stories. Eyeing the girls from my apartment door, listening to their laughter and storytelling, it struck me that human nature desires interpersonal contact. With all the distractions of technology gone, the girls sought one another’s company. I sat down and laughed along with them until very late. The power came back early in the morning, and by the next day students were again at their desks, clicking, restarting and downloading.

But something special happened that night. A sense of timelessness and community came out of that face-to-face contact. The students seemed oblivious to the novelty of the evening: conversation as entertainment. They didn’t seem conscious that they were enjoying themselves without gadgets, that life without technology didn’t necessarily “suck.” And while I’m certain they wouldn’t opt for another night without power if given the choice, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they remember that night as one of the best.