How I learned to read, write and use technology
Learning how to read and write takes me back to my younger years of elementary school. I was never enrolled into the public school system until my high school years. My kindergarten thru eighth grade education was in a small private Lutheran school located just outside of German Village in southern Columbus, Ohio. I didn’t even see my first actual computer in that school until about 1993, the apple PII computer that had a jaw dropping 4 color display for its educational programs.
The earliest I can recall learning how to read was in first grade, my teacher Miss Geiger would read children’s stories to us and we were to follow along in our books to see the words and get used to seeing them and associating the letters of the alphabet with the sounds they make to form words. I fondly remember using cassette tapes and turn-the-page-at-the-chime books. I believe I could read by the 2nd grade because by the end of 2nd grade we were already learning to write in cursive and I do recall doing my bible history homework in cursive prior to 3rd grade.
I first learned of my interest in writing my freshman year at Teays Valley High school. My English teacher Mrs. Ett taught us about using our ‘writers voice’ and using tone and description to improve our writing ability. I still have my English journal from that same class and chuckle from time about the trials and woes of high school life in the late 1990s. My use of technology was very limited then because there was no high speed internet and the only computer use at school was from waiting on a long list in the library’s sign on sheet.
Although looking back from what we take for granted today, the computer I had when I started high school had a 20 Megahertz processor and 15 Megabyte hard drive and it couldn’t even run windows 3.1. I remember using word perfect 5.0 (the first version with spell check) from the DOS command line and it took roughly 4 and a half minutes to start up. The keyboard that I typed on weighed roughly 20 pounds and had a thick coil cord and 4 metal prong connections to the main computer. Printing was always nightmare at my house, we had a very old Epson dot-matrix printer that had holes on the sides of the paper that fed and would always go crooked. The printer didn’t care if you had the sheets of paper lined up or even centered. I would honestly guess that one in 5 printed pages were of desired results.
A complete week after the tragedy of September 11th, 2001 I started college at Columbus state community college. My first quarter included English 101 Beginning Composition and my professor Mrs. Brown changed the way I have written ever since. She was the first teacher to tell me that I have a gift for writing because I have a nature writer’s voice. After I completed my first fall quarter 2001 it seems that online research really seemed to be catching on and seemed more and more a necessity for each and every class.
Children in schools today seem like they have all kinds of technology to help them to learn better reading and writing. Programs that are education based are more interactive and some students that are homeschooled never have the privilege to see the inside of a classroom with online studies. I have mixed feelings about the newer trends of technology it seems it makes anti-socialism more and more commonplace. A prime example of the technology making too drastic of a change is with the modern newspaper, more and more newspapers are canceling their physical paper prints and going to an online version of their paper.
To sum up for me, personally; technology should only be used as a tool to help guide people towards your idea or story. The days of only black and white print are not over but they much march alongside the new digital age complimenting each other not to win each other over but serve its masses collectively not separately.
