Take me to the CALL Course assignment, please
Our kids may grow up not remembering what life was like B.C. (Before Computers), but most of us still have vivid recollections of typewriters, card catalogs, the Dewey decimal system, white-out, and erasable bond typing paper -- all the traditional tools of the homework trade. As the mother of three children, ages 10 to 17, I've seen a major change in the way homework is done. And while I bless my computer every day for the resources it gives my kids, I'm not entirely worry-free about the ways in which my children's school habits have changed in the A.C. (After Computers) era.
Reed always turned in reports that were a mess. Markers bled through the cover, and sentences came to horribly illegible endings.
Let's start with my 10-year-old son. (Don't worry. I've received clearance from him to use his story and not be accused of journalistic exploitation.) In Reed's primary school years it was easy to walk into a classroom and tell which report was his. Try as he might, Reed always turned in reports that were a mess. Markers bled through the cover, erasures blackened entire pages, and sentences came to horribly illegible endings because he wouldn't consider the possibility of moving to the next line.
On Back to School nights, I could walk into a classroom and immediately spot his work. The teacher would carefully lay out each student's work on the desks, and we'd be able to spot Reed's from across the room. My husband and I would do the best we could to keep his reports hidden beneath our folded arms on the desktop.
That's not to say that the content of Reed's reports wasn't high-caliber. Sloppy penmanship (don't you wish they still made this part of the curriculum?) and a heavy hand were his only downfalls. That was in the B.C. era.
Computers have made a big difference in Reed's technique, but the net effect is that they've introduced a whole new set of problems. The computer has definitely allowed him to master the mechanics of creating a neat report, but all too often he gets caught up in making pretty pictures and forgets to concentrate on content.
Fonts are another distraction. You and I, in the interests of time and taste, will forgo using anything more dramatic than Arial, Helvetica, or Times Roman (basic fonts that come with your system). But kids like my son feel they are putting a personal stamp on their papers by finding the most outrageous (and usually illegible) fonts in existence. Often, one font won't do, and they produce a report that looks strikingly like a cut-and-paste ransom note. All of this font-finding takes time away from crafting a good report.
Parents have a tough time curing font and graphics mania on their own. Sometimes you need professional help. This year Reed's teacher caught on to the fact that the computer was leading Reed and not vice versa. She saw right through his latest report -- a handsome presentation on Samuel Morse that had specially scanned graphics and superb fonts. She realized it was pretty but content-free, and she punctuated her feelings by giving him a grade of B-.
Reed brought the paper home to us, bewildered that he'd done so poorly. We suggested that while we knew that his knowledge of Samuel Morse was pretty deep (as evidenced during our dinner conversations), he'd spent too much time making a pretty report and not enough time thinking about the substance and order of events. We suggested he redo and resubmit the paper, even if he did not receive a higher grade. He put up a bit of a battle, but he knew we weren't going to budge on it.
When kids find some key piece of information on the Internet or on a CD-ROM, they typically cut and paste the text into a word-processing file. Left unsupervised, kids (and many adults, too) will use the word-processing document they create as the foundation of their main document. In other words, they wind up editing someone's research instead of digesting it, reordering it, and using it to develop their own argument and chain of thought. The easiest cure for this is to make the child print out the information and then use it as a bunch of reference sheets, thus reducing the temptation to plagiarize.
And it's not just originality that suffers when kids cut and paste from reference materials -- it leads to an organization problem, as well. The trouble is that the text is on a computer screen and the most you can see at a stretch is three or four paragraphs. Without editing and copyediting on paper, even the most skilled writers wind up with choppy, illogical results. If your kids are working only at the computer and with digital information, they're never seeing their entire report, nor are they evaluating it for flow, logical consistency, and strength of argument. They are almost guaranteed to miss the big picture.
Reed is still no report-writing angel. Like the rest of us, he's still
a pushover for a great font or cool graphic, and I shudder because he has
discovered scanners and digital cameras. But he knows that content matters
more than his gee-whiz presentation, and he knows that the computer, with
all its charms, can easily lead him astray.
Robin Raskin is editor in chief of FamilyPC.
E-mail her at [email protected].
There are lots of ways to direct your kids' computer use so they produce reports that are much more than pretty pictures. Here are my four (notably unprofessional) recommendations to kids using the computer to write research reports.
Take me to the CALL Course assignment, please