Cut-and-Paste Generation

Last night, Son No 1 was struggling to complete his 500-word English writing assignment. This assignment has been in the back-burner for weeks. The teacher has kindly extended the submission deadline from this week to next week. So, it is "die-die must do" now.

This assignment ties in with the Commonwealth Essay-Writing Competition and there are a few topics to choose from. While I wanted to adopt a hands-off approach, I couldn't help intervening when I saw Son No 1 starting and stopping on a few topics. The problem, of course, was lack of planning and thinking.

Anyway, I helped Son No 1 choose what I think is the easiest topic for him - which is to write a letter to a friend in another Commonwealth country explaining about his own country. I gave him a few ideas on what he could write on and left him to do the job.

Thing is, even with all the scaffolding, he could not manage more than 1 paragraph after one night. There are many reasons for this. Though it is too tedious to list all the reasons here, one of the main attributable reasons, I find, is that this generation is too used to the "cut-and-paste" method of learning. Let me explain.

Son No 1 has many assignments for his various subjects and so he should have enough practice in writing. However, most of the time, the subject information can be found in Wikipedia and these kids tend to take the short cut (no pun intended) and "cut-and-paste". As a teacher, I am well aware of this temptation. So at the time when I was teaching in high school, my assignments were seldom the topical or factual types, but rather problem-based. That way, students still need to do their research, but at the end, they have to produce their solution in their own writing.

Anyway, coming back to this topic, I have warned Son No 1 of this bad habit when he is doing his assignments. He is aware that his brain is conditioned to this mechanical response - fingers type in search words, click, eyes look for related topics, fingers execute "cut-and-paste" function, format, print. Voila - assignment completed. And then I ask, "And so, what is gravitational erosion?" Don't know.

With awareness, I hope Son No 1 will conscientiously try to develop that part of his brain that is involved in writing. I am not talking just about grammar and sentence construction. I am talking about creativity, ideas, reflection. Writing is what we, the educationists, call an intrapersonal activity. One needs to sit down and focus, put ideas together. But of course, to build up ideas or content, one needs to read widely and most importantly, think. Now don't get me started on ''thinking" - it's worth 5,000 words at least.

At least, Son No 1 knows his weakness. Meanwhile, it's back to the drawing board for his essay...