Late nights, late nights, late nights. Every student’s been there, where you’re pouring your tired mind into an essay or project that was given months ago, but you waited until the night before to work on it. Mom thought you were working hard on it every day, since you spent hours upon hours on the computer. In reality, you were on Facebook or Twitter, checking up on friends. Or maybe you were watching some videos on YouTube, or listening to music on Pandora.

Whether it’s time to work on an essay or a long term project, every student is instead sucked into the black hole of distractions the Internet has to offer, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Pandora.

“To some students, they can provide a distraction,” junior Joshua Ford said.

Facebook and Twitter offer no educational purpose, so it’s no surprise why they’re banned on school computers, but a recent block on Pandora has had students wondering why. Pandora, unlike Facebook and Twitter, isn’t a means of communication but a free website allowing people to listen to music. When schoolwork is completed and there’s a bit of free time, why shouldn’t students be able to access seemingly harmless websites like Pandora or YouTube?

“I think that’s very stupid to have it blocked. We just listen to music,” sophomore Lydia Gardner said. “Music can be a helpful asset to help keep your mind focused more.”

In 1993, University of California at Irvine psychologist Frances H. Rauscher along with her associates found that after having college students listen to Mozart’s music, there was an “enhanced spatial task performance” among them. This was soon referred to as the “Mozart effect,”a theory that suggested listening to Mozart would make someone smarter.

While this theory is still thriving today, University of Vienna researchers Jakob Pietschnig, Martin Voracek and Anton K. Formann found that there was no evidence for “specific cognitive enhancements” by just listening to Mozart’s music. The “Mozart effect” is nothing but a myth, which was even ranked as number six in Emory University psychologist Scott E. Lilienfeld’s book “50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology.”

Students may believe that music helps them study, but Principal Joe Gilhaus holds a different opinion.

“If people use these means of technology outside of school and they’re helpful for them, and help them communicate, and are fun to be on for entertainment purposes in a positive way, then I think it’s good. But I have yet to see the significant factors someone would be able to tell me how Pandora can improve an English grade, or how YouTube can help us with Geometry or Algebra,” Principal Joe Gilhaus said.

While YouTube may be only seen as a means of entertainment for many, teachers have found ways to implement YouTube into their curriculum as well.

“There’s definitely educational content on YouTube,” government teacher Tony Budetti said. “It’s a kind of file system for everything that’s happened that I might want to use in my class, whether it’s the Rodney King beating or a presidential speech.”

Though there is educational content on YouTube, streaming audio and video also uses up a lot of bandwidth. Bandwidth is essentially how much information can pass through a wire at one time. Although websites such as Pandora and YouTube appear to be harmless, they use a lot of bandwidth, which creates a lot of traffic on the servers. It makes the computers run slower when students and teachers are trying to access sites on the Internet. According to computer analyst Barbara Watkins, the school’s bandwidth cannot be broadened. The district can only eliminate access to these bandwidth-eating sites.

By: Hanan El Shoubaki