Growing up, I was taught by nuns…lots and lots of nuns. If you ever had a nun as a teacher, you know that they are/were sticklers for grammar, spelling and penmanship. If you dangled a modifier or a participle or spelled something incorrectly or wrote it sloppily, they’d nail you for it every time. Sometimes they seemed mean or vindictive, but I like to think I learned a lot from them.
I think today’s kids are still being taught the basics of grammar, spelling and penmanship, but they have far fewer opportunities to use those skills in their daily lives. I’m pretty sure that cell phones and computers are, ironically, going to be the cause of the dumbing down of an entire generation.
As I’ve mentioned before, I have a high school child and a college child. Both of them are voracious “texters.” They can BTW and BRB faster than the blink of an eye. They’ve also grown up in a world of computers. They type faster than I ever could. With the exception of taking notes during class, I think it’s almost rare that they put a pen to paper.
Their daily communications are filled with acronyms and emoticons and abbreviations. When they write a paper, Microsoft Word highlights mistakes and can usually correct them. It’s as if they hardly need to engage their brains to communicate. It’s bad enough that virtually all of their contact with the outside world is passive, but that’s another post for another time.
I just think that communicating “old school” (a handwritten letter or a face-to-face chat) might be good for them once in a while.
