Probably not, but sometimes learning for learnings sake is a good thing and helps overall penmanship which is much needed considering how awful it has gotten.
Once again I'm not sure whether you're talking about script or printing. Just yesterday I asked an 18 year old music student what he does in writing and he showed me a little bit of his writing. He says it's awful and it really didn't look very good. But since I am teaching him music I am interested in what he is able to do with the things I am teaching him and his work is excellent.
He says that he is allowed to use his laptop in class to type but he is not allowed to record because there is some kind of rule against it. I don't know what or why that is.
Yes and no. If you asked this 5-10 years ago I would have said yes. Covid really damaged the youth and the education system in general. I do not see it returning or getting better. I hear the younger kids are struggling even more. Every year the kids feel younger and less capable.
Because of the nature of my work, I teach students of all ages. Right now my youngest student is 8. My oldest student is 85. Working one on one is a totally different experience and much more rewarding. I started teaching at around 18 so I have been doing this 58 years. When people study music they do so because of a personal passion rather than because it is a requirement. So what I am teaching and how I am teaching it is basically the same as when I started. But because of technology I think everyone learns faster and better. When I started out I wrote music by hand. It was extremely slow. Now with modern music programs I do the same thing I do here with the English language. I can produce music about 100 times better and it is completely easy to read. So I am 100% involved with modern technology. Because I now teach online there is never a reason for me to write anything by hand. So my exploration of handwriting of all kinds is simply a personal project coming from curiosity. But I do believe it improves the mind.
My interest in dictation is because it is faster and I make fewer mistakes. If I were typing this message would be about 1/4th as long.
But I do enjoy my university professorship as those students are literally paying to be there and are invested. Still though, they lack certain skills that in the past would have been learned in grade school.
In my experience younger people also have skills that we didn't have. I often get useful technological suggestions from them about how to make things work better on the computer. I remember years ago seeing a student typing on a phone with two thumbs at a speed that absolutely amazed me. The skill is probably decreasing now because many young people are dictating on their phone as I do.
One on one, my students do very well. Not really an option very often though, with our class sizes of 30 plus. So the answer might lie somewhere in that. However, I am not so sure we are in the transition stage, but the final stage until something completely different takes place. This is not a retool but a rebuild at this point.
I absolutely despise the idea of being in a class of 30. Not only do I teach one on one, I want to learn that way. I don't want to be one of many. I think this is what needs to change in the future. The last time I was in a class was for language when I was learning German. I went back to a classroom situation because I felt like there were things that I needed to know that I had not learned. But I was already able to speak to some extent and I could read books.
I went back to a beginning class just to make sure that I had everything in place. What I saw was very disappointing and that was something like 35 years ago. The rest of the students were only there because of a language requirement, and none of them knew anything. By the end of the year we were down to something like 10 people and that was better. Even so the only other student who knew anything was a girl from Argentina who already spoke German in a high school and was there only to fulfill a language requirement. So when you talk about the ignorance of young people, my view that has really always been about the same. The only difference is where the ignorance is keep shifts to, and it is always in different areas.
My number one concern is students not being able to retain the information they have mastered. Within a few weeks or months they essentially brain dump everything. I have tried a few things, but I am at a loss of how to fix it right now.
When people don't retain things it is because what they are learning is not important to them. I find that when people are self-motivated they learn just as well as they did in the past. I don't know what you teach but I would say that that's the number one problem.
Sometimes parents want their children to learn music because they think it will be good for them. That never works unless a child switches over and becomes interested in music for its own sake. When I was in school I frankly did not give a damn about most anything I was learning. I just went to school because it was a requirement and I was smart enough to do well enough without much effort. The only thing I excelled at was music because that was my passion, and everything I have learned about learning in life has come from how I learned music.
When I am working with young people, I tell them that sports and music are two of the rare things that you can't cram for. You have to build patiently and you have to do the work on a daily basis. I think this is why athletes and musicians figure out early that everything has to build slowly. If I get a musician who is also passionate about at least one sport, then I know everything is going to work. But in school everything is about grades. Later on in life you find out that this was all wrong and for many people it's too damn late.
