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Tangoing with Technology
"Isn’t education supposed to be about my mind, not some machine’s? "
By Ankitha Bharadwaj
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When Youth Radio's Ankitha Bharadwaj purchased her very first computer she was hooked on the efficiency of technology. But soon after using so much of it in school, she noticed it enables people to excercise their minds. She says, "...I miss the good old days when a calculator was just a calculator and not a tiny robot with a mind of its own."
I used to think technology was like butter, making anything and everything better. I remember when my family got our first computer. My mom and I watched The Matrix online, played endless rounds of solitaire, and contacted relatives across the planet.
But now, with technology invading every corner of my classrooms, I feel suffocated by it.
Like my statistics class. Just the other day, I was finding the standard deviation of a data set and formulating its regression line equation. I know that sounds confusing. But it only took 5 minutes to do the problem by hand. When I followed the calculator instructions, it took 15!
I know teachers are integrating technology partly to make school subjects more kid-friendly.
I’m not saying get rid of technology altogether. It’s just that I miss the good old days when a calculator was just a calculator and not a tiny robot with a mind of its own. Isn’t education supposed to be about my mind, not some machine’s?
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