Glob posted...
The children that Ive taught in the last few years definitely have worse social skills, attention span, problem solving capabilities and struggle to think independently compared to those I taught earlier in my career.
It's definitely a result of having access to technology. It is difficult to foster problem solving skills when students don't have to actually struggle to learn information. A lot of exercises that I had to do in elementary school, such as looking up 10 vocabulary words in the dictionary and copying down their meanings, were actually incredibly valuable. Having to peruse a dictionary in order to find where a word belongs teaches a level of pattern recognition, and having to actually copy something down from a book onto a piece of paper teaches attention to detail.
But nowadays, I don't know if students do this anymore - more often than not they probably have access to technology that tells them what a word means, sounds it out for them, uses it in a sentence for them, and so their learning is all about instant gratification due to technology.
It makes life very difficult for them when they get into high school. So many students struggle with math because unless they encounter a problem that they know how to solve from start to finish, they don't even dare to *start* it because they're not used to struggling through failure. A lot of parents have a hard time with it too, because they're not used to their kids experiencing challenges, and I'm of course the bad guy because I'm trying to teach them how to grow.