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How today’s ‘digital beings’ learn

Pretty soon, ‘back to school’ won’t mean standing in long line-ups at Wal-Mart or Zellers or Staples with grumpy children and haggard parents clinging desperately to wobbly shopping carts.

Pretty soon, ‘back to school’ won’t mean standing in long line-ups at Wal-Mart or Zellers or Staples with grumpy children and haggard parents clinging desperately to wobbly shopping carts.

Carts overflowing with compulsory educational items like binders, pens, sheets of material designed to write upon, with obsolete names like “loose leaf,” “foolscap” and countless other items that have been on Back-to-School lists since schools, and lists, were invented.

Pretty soon, the harried Back-to-School Supplies Shopping Ritual will be a thing of the past, replaced by a single gleaming piece of equipment: a laptop computer sitting on the desk of every student that stumbles reluctantly into their home room on their first day back at school.

This is good news for parents who dread the back to school list-filling mayhem of stocking up on school supplies, all of which will go on a 70 per cent off sale immediately after you can’t return them.

The bad news is, you still get to go through the universal Back-to-School Clothing Debacle, where the daughters go “Ewwww” at everything you pick out, and the sons have to be forced by armed guards to actually go to the mall with their Mom, and try on even one pair of jeans.

Even the digital age can’t change that miserable tradition. Or can it?

Thing is, the digital age seems to change everything. Already some schools do in fact provide each and every student with their own laptops, and instead of completing assignments in ‘traditional’ essay or written form, students submit their work as videos, audio podcasts or other technological formats meant to confuse their parents who are still trying to figure out how to work the TV remote.

So that means our digital darlings, after a summer of occasionally venturing outside to hang around with friends at the 7/11, and then hurrying back into their houses to hunker down in front of giant flat screen TV movies, countless video games involving shooting gangsters and zombies in a strangely lifelike video world, and surfing adult sites on the Interweb, are heading back to school where they will spend a better part of the day noodling on laptops. They’ll be keyboarding in computer labs, and watching videos on screens that have infested every classroom and hallway of the modern educational establishment.

In a recent Canadian Press article, one teacher related the poignant tale of a young student who was frustrated that a teacher was making the class take notes off an ancient device known as an overhead projector.

The student challenged the teacher: “What an incredible waste of time, why don’t they just share them digitally?” the student asked.

This incident was relayed in the article as an example of a perceptive student with a valid point. Other non-digital persons might view it as a case of a lazy, digitally-spoiled pupil who wants to click with one finger instead of putting a semi-obsolete device (a pen) to a semi-obsolete medium (paper), thereby risking the chance that they might succeed in a semi-obsolete activity (learning something).

In fact, one of the few things that stuck with me during my five or 6sixyears as a high school student at Lindsay Thurber Comprehensive High was an eccentric genius of a teacher who said over and over again: “Think with your pencil.”

This was a profound statement by a strange person that of course nobody understood whatsoever.

But it stuck with me.

Turns out, he was right. Studies show that the simple act of writing something down increases your ability to remember and understand what you are writing, as well as increasing the cramps in the hand and fingers. Are our children missing out on all that learning and all those finger cramps by passively staring at a screen all day?

One school principal doesn’t think so. Darrell Lonsberry, principal of the Calgary Science School says that all this technology is ”a recognition that this is the way our students live outside of the school — they’re entirely digital beings.”

Digital beings? An interesting way to put it — what parent hasn’t at one time or another wondered just what kind of “being” their child is?

Still, all the experts agree on one thing. It doesn’t matter whether the student is scribbling with a crayon or scrolling with a mouse, it’s the teacher and that teacher’s success in creating an interesting, challenging and productive lesson that really matters.

Well, that’s what really matters to the parents. The students don’t have time to worry about lesson plans and learning objectives. Today’s digital beings are too busy on the school laptops Twittering and Facebooking their friends.

And hey, if I was in school these days, I know that’s what I would be doing. And that genius teacher I had in Grade 10 Math? He’d be saying, over and over again: “Remember class, think with you mouse. Think with your mouse.”

But I wouldn’t listen, of course. I’d be too busy checking out YouTube.

Harley Hay is a freelance writer living in Red Deer.