Article Assessment #1

What follows are my thoughts on "Listen to the Natives" by Marc Prensky.

I found this article very interesting. To be perfectly honest, as I am a digital immigrant, I am still a bit of a traditionalist with regard to using "technology" in the classroom. As a mathematician, I believe that it is wrong for a math teacher to advance too much of a technology-oriented curriculum. K-12 math is extremely basic, and every single one of our students (with few exceptions) should be able to master the curriculum without significant recourse to computers.

Would Prensky, advocate elementary school students' not learning how to add, subtract, multiple and divide manually, but on a computer? While computers carry profound advantages, a disadvantage of theirs is that they enable humanity to a certain extent to turn off their minds.

While Prensky had a good point that teachers need to take students' interests into account when teaching, I believe that most students are too immature to recognize what is and is not good for them. If eighth graders had a choice as to what they would study in social studies class, I believe that a large percentage would opt to study the personal lives of such Hollywood celebrities as Britney Aguilera and Christina Spears (or whatever the hell the names of the pop stars the kids are into these days are). In certain respects I despise Hollywood from the core of my being and believe it is rotting society.

While cell phones, computers, televisions, iPods, etc. are important, we need to ensure our youth don't get sucked into them and lead meaningless, dull, superficial lives.