By Chloe Kiparsky
I’ve always loved paper. When I was little, I was fascinated by how a pencil, when you drag it across paper, makes a mark. I love to bury my nose in a book and smell its unique scent. But increasingly, my time and my classmates’ time is spent on a keyboard and screen.
Paper is not inaccessible, even in the age of screens. It’s just that we don’t use it anymore. We used to take tests on paper, study on paper, learn on paper and whiteboards.
Now when paper is used in the classroom, it’s almost surprising. It’s not that our teachers don’t care, it’s that our society’s norms are changing rapidly. Screens are the way we do things now, simple as that. We are constantly on screens, we use them at school and groan, and then right when we get home from school we get off the computer and go straight to our phones. Our screen time is increasing both in school and out.
Of course, there are benefits to computers: they are undoubtedly faster and cut a lot of time out of many aspects of school. Writing, watching videos, and easily accessing information and resources have all been streamlined ever since computers have been normalized.
There couldn’t be anything bad about this, right? Wrong. Using computers more often at school sacrifices major learning techniques that a lot of people depend on. For example, tactile learning opportunities are invaluable to a lot of students. Using computers for everything severely limits those hands-on lessons that are so fun and helpful.
Many students nowadays write their notes on iPads or computers, but that doesn’t actually help you learn. The movements for typing are the same as each other, you move your fingers in basically the same way for every letter, while on paper you have to focus on the individual shapes. Typing doesn’t access the same part of your brain as handwriting does: it is very mindless and easy to type while handwriting focuses your brain and makes it pay attention.
When COVID started, the whole world started trying to find ways to reduce the risk of getting sick. For schools, the easiest way to do this was to make all our learning and schoolwork online. But now in Ouray, where the risk of getting COVID is lower than before, we still haven’t gone back to the way it used to be.
Tech is easy. That’s why we use it. Computers streamline our academic lives. Without Google Drive, it would be much harder to collaborate on a piece of writing. Without dictionary.com, we would be spending five minutes to find one definition. Without Schoology, we would be forgetting our homework all the time. Our society has gotten so dependent on technology that if it ceased to exist, the world would tumble into chaos.
The expanded use of computers is perfectly legitimate, as long as we continue to feed all learning styles. If with computers, we’re saving time that would otherwise be used for painstakingly writing every letter on the board, that’s great, but only if that saved time is used to enrich the learning MORE, not just adding more work because we have more time now.
Is our society - and our school - sacrificing rich learning experiences for simple and convenient ones? It’s incredibly ironic that I’m writing this on a computer, and sad that my brain didn’t even register the click of keys replacing the scratch of a pencil. I miss that scratch.