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A grandmother in a purple sweater smiles while looking at a tablet with her granddaughter.
The image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.
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Now this might sound like “old man yelling at cloud,” but hear me out.
This has been a long-raging debate going back every step of the way in technology. And a lot of the time, technological advancements are a good thing. They get us to doing those things we want to be doing: Working on hobbies, spending time with loved ones, and other pleasant pastimes and distractions.
Most of the time, these advancements in technology are removing repetitive, mundane tasks. Not removing things that we want to be doing.
An example of this is with new AI music apps that actually advertise their platforms by telling you that you'll no longer have to play your guitar or sing in order to make music, showing an E-Girl delightedly giving up her guitar and having the App do it for her. Those musos out there will know that this is the culmination of a fear that has been stirring since the dawn of the synthesizer, sequencers, MIDI, and the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).
Certainly, all of these things each lowered the bar of entry for creating music, but where AI is different from all of these other music technological advancements is this: The requirement of a skillful operator. You still needed to be able to play keys to play synthesized sounds, to program midi you need to understand musical elements like harmonic structure, timing, and arrangement. Most of all, to understand how to use a DAW properly and effectively, you need some level of engineering and production knowledge.
Handwriting, too, shares the place of an important skill that has been thrown to the wayside by the promise of technology. Even to my generation, it was taught as “essential”, more important than typing and writing on a keyboard, which was recognized as an essential skill too, but not on the level of handwriting. And though it had been under threat since the dawn of the printing press in 1440, and then the typewriter in the late 1800s, even before personal computing took the stage, we were made to learn handwriting and told that we would be using it daily in our adult lives.
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The image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.
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We knew this skill was important, but now, a few years down the line of removing handwriting and cursive from school curriculums we now know how important it is as a skill. We now know that the ability to actually write letters and sentences by hand is an important keystone for other skills like literacy, creating important and unique neural pathways, and boosting memory retention for reading and writing far more effectively than typing.
It's one of those building blocks that you might not like doing as a kid, and that takes dull focus and repetition to learn. The knock-on effects of not developing good handwriting skills at a young age are not conducive to literacy later on. Not learning handwriting, print, and cursive in their forms can quite simply make kids functionally illiterate, or make competent reading and typing much harder for them.
Technology has long distracted us from the “important” parts of life, communicating with and bonding with others through shared time and interests. We've become increasingly isolated from our neighbors, friends, and communities.
Spending time with our children, though, is supposed to be one area we should prioritize. If you have children, it is probably THE thing that you're trying to reduce time spent in other areas to get back to. This involves teaching and learning with them and helping them build important skills and responsibilities that will support them for the rest of their lives.
All too often we push these responsibilities off onto technology, setting our kids up with the wonderful glowing rectangle to watch a video or to play a game, or when they're older to teach them how to read and to write, skills that take great focus and time to learn and require being bored and being comfortable with that state of mind so that our brains can fully accept and take in the new information that we are trying to force into it and build the new neural pathways that need to be built in order to remember and understand, well, everything.
This idea, this divide between those who see a problem with using technology for such things and those who do not, along with the age-old feeling of rejection and feeling of being judged by our in-laws, brought a brewing conflict to a head between this family. This grandmother got her 4th-grade iPad-kid granddaughter to read an actual book instead of just learning through her iPad, like the girl's mother, the grandmother's daughter-in-law, had wanted.
Her granddaughter had long struggled with reading simply because she had never had the proper approach to learning the skill. When she was watching her granddaughter after school, she realized that the reading app that her granddaughter was using was actually reading out the stories to her, leaving the young girl with little to actually do or learn except sit there or listen. She instead gave the girl a book to read and instructed her to read through a page and ask if there were any words that she did not understand or know how to sound out.
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