Upon starting this blog, I wasn’t sure what to write about. As I was contemplating what to write, my sister said, “Why don’t you do it on whether elementary school age children should be allowed to text?” She’s eleven. And apparently a genius.
This is something we talked about extensively with Professor Tweedie in his module. Getting a cell phone seems to be a right of passage for teeny boppers these days, but I didn’t even get my first cell phone until I was sixteen. This just shows how quickly technology is advancing, and how society is changing.
“Did texting affect how you wrote for papers in school?” I ask. She says it did. “At the end of summer in the beginning of September, I made a couple mistakes,” she says. These mistakes relate directly to texting. She says she started a lot of sentences with ‘and’, even though younger students are advised not to because of the potential for fragments. “I would spell ‘because’ b cuz. I also didn’t use commas, or capitalize proper nouns.” This, though, only happened at the beginning of the year. Once the school year began to unfold further, she no longer made these mistakes.
She also makes the point that with texting, there is no need to go over what was texted. But in school, you have to read over and edit all written work.
I am not against texting, I am just simply aware of the most common mistakes made by children in their writing as direct result of it–as an up and coming teacher should be.
This is an interesting post, thanks for sharing your thoughts on it. I was just thinking this morning about how quickly things are changing, as far as technology is concerned. I’m only 26, and I already feel such a gap between myself and younger generations – I didn’t have a cell phone until my freshman year of college, and didn’t have one with texting capabilities until I graduated college. I’d be curious to know how all this texting is affecting social aspects of life, as well as educational aspects…seems younger people make more spontaneous plans, are more go-with-the-flow, and don’t pay full attention when speaking to someone in person (due to constant texting).
Anyway! You got me thinking. =) Thanks for the post!
Very clever title! I can see that texting is effecting younger kids more and more. I think some parents are so crazy allowing their seven year olds have cell phones. That’s just nuts! If street talk alone effects the way kids write then texting will deffinitely also have that effect on their writing. So i agree completly. Cell phones are great, but does a elementary school student need one?
This might be a useful article for you to look at
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson
Seems that texting may afterall be contributing to a more literary age than ever before,
ailsa