Hello, friends.
I usually try to write these updates on Saturday but G had a friend’s birthday party at a trampoline park in a town about twenty-five minutes away and there was traffic on the way home and I was tired and….
Well, here I am on Sunday. Let’s go!
Welcome to the 70th installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and using why too much technology is bad.
Who would like more of my writing? Or, the better question, who wouldn’t like more of my writing? Well, becoming a paid Patron on my Patreon, where I write about things in more detail than I do in the newsletter or on my website, including the actual names of my works-in-progress and not just codenames. The lowest tier for Patreon is $1 but at $5/month, we’re looking at some serious help.
I mean, if every subscriber or reader of this newsletter, or every social media follower I have became a Patron at even just the $1 tier, I could write more and pay my bills better. The same would happen if they bought copies of my books.
You can also buy me a coffee through Ko-Fi.
Echoes on the Pond is out now! Grab a copy, if you haven’t already. If you have bought it already, books make great gifts! And if you’ve read Echoes on the Pond, I’d also really love (and appreciate) it if you’d leave a nice review on Amazon or Goodreads.
You can also get my collection Catalysts or my novellas Alice on the Shelf and Shadowed.
Anyway, let’s do this!
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I mentioned last week that I was editing Project: Monster on my iPad, using a PDF and the Apple Pencil. This week I’m going along and scroll from one page to another and I’m suddenly in a different scene. Confused, I scrolled up. The previous page was page 61. The following page was 65. Somehow, pages 62, 63, and 64 were missing. Did they not export? Did I accidentally delete them somehow?
I became annoyed and frustrated because I’d done 61 pages of editing and now thought I might have to have two documents with the edits. I stopped for the night and thought about it the following day. As I sat at my MacBook looking at the PDFs, one with the missing pages and the other without, I remembered that I could easily copy and paste PDF pages on a Mac. I’ve done it many times at work. So that’s what I did and now the pages are restored.
The only other technology issue I had was that some of the edits I’d made suddenly disappeared. They were edits I’d just made and I think I accidentally did something. I easily redid the edits and moved on.
Overall, doing the edits this way has been good. And on it goes.
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In this spot over on Patreon, I updated Patrons on some work on my graphic novel idea for this week. The only way to know about it is to become a Patron!
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My day job is teaching art and technology. I teach Photoshop, InDesign, writing, a tiny bit of animation, and the like. Project-based learning is where it’s at. For instance, I have the students do a comic book project. They have 18 days to write, draw, layout, and “publish” an 8-to-12-page comic book. They use characters I have them create in another project and tell a story with them using a myth, fairy tale, folktale, or legend as a jumping off point. They learn writing, reading comprehension, math, science, and history in this project. Same goes for every other project I teach. A frickin’ incredible program.
And we’re hurting. Our numbers have been declining in the last few years. But we’re not the only ones. All of the technology based programs in the vocational technical school I teach in has seen such declines. When I talk to colleagues in other vocational schools they’re reporting the same thing. I’m not going to look to see if there’s data because I’m too lazy but I believe it. Why is this happening?
I think part of it too much technology in school.
The rise of apps like TikTok and Instagram that allow people to edit videos rather easily and take interesting pictures fairly easily have definitely helped with the decline. Why take a program and spend four years learning what these apps can do easily? I mean, beside expertise and understanding the why of the artform, and learning what makes good art/media/entertainment.
More than those apps, though, I believe the Chromebooks have struck a major blow. The students receive Chromebooks when they come in as freshmen and are required to have them in every academic class they’re in. They’re not just using Google Classroom but things like Blookit, Kahoot, ST Math, and other things. Teachers are being shown and expected to use all sorts of technology to “help” teaching, including AI resources that I’ve spoken about before.
From the time students get into school, now, they’re hooked up. We yell at them about being on their phones but they’re on their Chromebooks all day and using their school email and other features to communicate, goof off, and generally be kids.
Teachers have tools like GoGuardian that can monitor things but that only comes in so handy.
And the kids are sick of it when they explore career technical programs (aka shops) that require use of the computer.
This is bad. Technology is the most important thing in our lives right now. That’s a bold statement and I do not make it gently. I am not happy with it. But it’s fact. If The System goes down, it’s taking us all with it.
What I like about Chromebooks and the Google Education Suite is that it’s equitable. All students now have the ability to write a paper on a word processing app. They can all learn how to do slideshows, get email, and be able to do things that, in the past, students couldn’t do because of the price of technology. This is a Good Thing.
The rest, though? Are the students learning what they need to know? Does having them open their Chromebooks the moment they go into the academic class really help teach? Based on what I’m seeing, I have doubts.
Take Google Docs, for instance. (Please, take it. It had light years to go before it’s as good as MS Word…but the price is right…). Google Docs is one of the most important apps I can think of. Students as recently as ten years ago had trouble writing papers outside of school if their parents didn’t splurge on the Microsoft Office Suite–or at least just Word–when they got their computers. They’d have to download an open source writing app and there’d be problems with saving and all the rest. Google Docs gave people the ability to write for free. Again, this is Good. But many of the freshmen who come into my shop don’t know how to use it.
Students don’t know how to indent, they don’t know how to double-space, they can’t add page numbers, and some don’t know to never write centered. How is this? Students are using Google Docs in elementary school and middle school, so surely by high school, shouldn’t they know these things?
In my experience, no. I think teachers believe other teachers have taught it or will teach it. But no one is. This means it falls on me to undo years of bad habits and incorrect ways of doing things in order for the students to write a poorly-written piece because spelling is no longer truly taught. Maybe there’s an app for that? Or maybe teachers in elementary schools should teach it? I don’t know.
But the kids are doing Blookit and Kahoot. And their Google Form quizzes.
These are great tools and I use some of them, but what is the effect they’re having on the students?
Of course, the main culprit is not the technology, really, but the standardized tests we force on students. The tech helps teachers lead the students to the standardized tests.
So we can all pat ourselves on the backs because we have the best technology and our scores on the standardized tests are high, but the creativity and willingness to experiment is dying. As a result, those of us who use the technology in our careers are starting to hurt because people are avoiding it.
And what for? Certainly not to be able to read or write. Or do math. Or know history. Or have even the basic understanding of science.
And when a populace can’t think or create, where does that leave us? Sliding toward fascism.
It’s almost as if it was planned this way, isn’t it.
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Well, I think I’ve said it all today. Thank you for reading!
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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