PEN A MIGHTY TOOL IN THE WRITE HANDS
Benefits of old-school problem solving (on paper) are wide-ranging and include the power to reconnect
MY apologies to the trees, but I’m bringing paper back.
Despite the efforts of schools, the government and businesses to persuade me from my preference for hard copy, I’m fighting back – and the pen is mightier than the (virtual) sword.
I’m not a technophobe, I’m typing this on a new (but already filthy) laptop, I have the latest iPhone edition (already been dropped in water) and I’m like a Schoolie when it comes to my bingeing ability with Netflix.
Yet there’s something about a screen that diminishes our engagement.
I understand the need to teach our kids how to work in an online space, but it does concern me that so much of their homework requires a device.
If you add one child who’d rather be making slime to a parent who can never remember which sign-on is for what, it equals not a lot of learning.
My son tracks along with a steady B for maths, he listens in class, understands most of the concepts and attempts to reinforce that new knowledge via various applications like Mathletics, IXL etc … it’s all Greek to me.
But this online learning excludes not only parental guidance but also the tactile experience of ‘working out’ a problem with pencil and paper.
The other week, my son’s fantastic teacher sent home a worksheet – an actual piece of paper – of fraction equations in preparation for a test. Together, we sat down and went through the problems (Year 5 maths is about where my knowledge ends), and using that pencil I could see where he was going right and where he was going wrong.
And then, he aced the test. As in, an actual A.
There’s been plenty of controversy about the introduction of online NAPLAN testing this year – with the focus firmly on whether the comparison of pen-and-paper to computer results is truly an apples-toapples situation.
But what worries me is that it adds yet another dimension to this already contentious test – you’re now being assessed on your ability to type.
Pen and paper may be old school, but it is a level playing field. The fact that we still vote using paper is an indication of which format is considered more trustworthy.
A friend told me recently that at his workplace they regularly conduct staff surveys in order to improve management behaviours. Normally he would hand out a piece of A4 paper to his dozens of employees and would receive every single one back. They weren’t always positive, but they were always completed.
This year, the company changed that survey to online as part of their efforts to go paperless. Despite reminding his employees to fill out the questions, so few responses were received that the feedback was unusable.
There’s just something about holding a hard copy in our hand that connects us to what we’re doing – whether it’s a matter of homework, business or leisure. In fact, unlike video shops, the death of local book stores has been greatly exaggerated. Much like, I hope, that of newspapers.
But the connection we still feel to paper is just one side of the page – on the other is the disconnection fostered by screens.
While a mass shooting at a gaming event in Florida last week, where the shooter killed not only himself but others because he lost a game, is the worst possible result of our online addiction – not to mention the result of a number of other factors including, but not limited to, access to guns and mental health issues – it is a painfully sharp reminder of the dangers of living in a virtual world.
A friend who is a child psychologist tells me a huge number of her young clients are dealing with social detachment due to devices.
She says these Gold Coast kids are pale and suffering from a lack of vitamin D due to the excessive time spent indoors gaming. Worse, they no longer care about any achievements in the real world – scoring points online is the only thing that matters. They have no life but that online. Little wonder perhaps that their American counterpart killed when they were ‘killed’.
Luckily, in this country, access to guns isn’t such an issue. But access to devices is. I should know, I’m on the frontline – fighting against the forces of Fortnite, Minecraft and YouTube.
And my best defence? A good book. It’s a digital death by paper cuts.