Hmmm. Let's review. My 15-month-old granddaughter knows how to look at pictures on the phone by swiping from left to right and vice-versa to change from one picture to the next. She knows how to enlarge and shrink the screen. My daughter and her friend even tonight were joking about having to learn cursive handwriting when no one ever writes that way anymore. Online banking has removed the need to keep a check register. Receiving change from cashiers is always preceded by the "register" telling you how much change is needed. Every smart phone made in the last two years has the capability for people to search by voice command and texting can be done by speaking rather than typing. Text messages and Facebook messages are typically about 20 words long. Twitter only has room for 140 characters per tweet. No matter how long an article is on the internet, most people read only the first two paragraphs. Information garnered from articles with headings is most of the time limited to the heading and two sentences. Fewer and fewer people handle money. People swipe their cards instead. Skype and Facetime are as easy to use as regular voice mode when carrying on conversations. Taking pictures of things to remind ourselves of what information it might have carried is the most common way for reminding ourselves of something.
It's a great irony that teachers think their classroom teaching approximates anything relevant to survival in today's world. I'm seeing the iridium already building up in the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene (formerly the Tertiary) layers of the Earth. Just by way of reminder - no dinosaur remains have been found above the K-Pg (KT) boundary. The brain really does develop through what it takes to survive in the present and in the future.
I'm thinking that some changes are in order.
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