At times like these, when August dwindles down, an academic's thoughts begin to turn towards school and students.   What concerns me most now about my existing and future students -- and it has been creeping up over the last few years -- is that they are now constantly, every day, learning the worst habits possible for academic and most other achievement. Central to this is the loss of the ability to concentrate on one task at a time.   Everything conspires against this, from the natural excitement of this period of their lives, to the technological overconnection that has scattered their selves to the virtual four winds. Every day they are learning over and over again how to be distracted, bouncing from one thing to another on their laptops, listening with one ear while they watch some video, or drive chattering with their cellphones on.   This style of existing is not inherently bad: multitasking is not only fun, it is certainly something that seems to be essential to "today's city living" -- as the ads proclaim. But it is a hopeless way to learn anything seriously.   Learning anything seriously requires long hours of work, repetition, organic development of skills. Even those tasks that appear to be the juggling of many things simultaneously -- for example, cooking -- require a narrative structure to get from raw materials to finished product.   Universities now proclaim their "with-it" status by handing out Iphones and touting onlineness as innovative teaching tools. Most of this seems to me to be a form of giving up on the hard things. But then of course universities are so busy these days with so many different things on their minds, that maybe they haven't had the time to sit and pay concentrated attention to the question of what is the best thing to do.