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.

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