Читать книгу VIVO Voice-In / Voice-Out - William Crossman - Страница 11

Imagine you teach writing/composition to college undergraduates, as I do. And imagine you’ve given a take-home writing assignment to your students. The next class period, you collect the essays, all written on computers, and that night you start to grade them for content, organization of ideas, and language skills (grammar, spelling, punctuation, language use). The first thing you notice—and it’s old hat by now—is that no matter how rough the content and organization of the essays, the language skills are perfect. Of course! Students ran their completed essays through grammar-check and spell-check programs before handing them in.

One problem facing you at this point, as the person who is supposed to give feedback on these essays and grade them, is that you don’t know whether these students are able to write a grammatically correct sentence. Unless they took the time to compare the essay they first typed into the computer with the essay the computer eventually printed out, they don’t know either. The point here is: does it matter?

Now imagine it’s Year 2010, and you’re still teaching writing/composition at the same college, and you’ve assigned a similar essay. By now, students will have traded in their keyboard-type, text-driven models for VIVO computers. How will this change things?

The main difference is that, before, when students entered their essays via text, they had to have some writing skills—they had to be able to write something that was correct enough in grammar, spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary to enable the computer to produce the flawless finished product. They also had to have some reading skills to read their sentences as they wrote them. Using VIVO computers, students don’t have to have any writing or reading skills at all to produce a perfectly “written” essay.

The student merely speaks into her VIVO computer; her words get organized into complete spoken sentences and paragraphs via her miracle software; non-words, incorrect phrases, and grunts get dropped or replaced with their correct counterparts; spelling and punctuation are irrelevant since the finished product will be oral, not printed; finally, she “proofreads” the outputted “essay” by listening to it and making final corrections. She then emails the e-talk folder to you and, just to be certain you receive it, puts a backup spoken copy onto a diskette which she hands to you the next day.

But, wait. You had assigned a written essay; the student had misremembered. Easy enough. Her classroom VIVO, like those of her classmates, is programmed with a speech-to-text option. She flips on her VIVO, prints out a copy of her text after running it through grammar-check and spell-check, and presents to you her now correctly completed written assignment. She still hasn’t written or read a single word. Voice-in, voice-out—plus push-a-button print-out.

How do you grade her writing? Again: does it matter? Does it matter that she may not be able to read or write?

It matters to you because you’re a writing teacher, you’re committed to teaching students how to write better, and you’re getting paid to do it. You believe it’s still very important for people to learn to write and read, so you’ve decided to change your teaching techniques. From now on, you won’t let your students use their VIVO computers at all for writing assignments. You’ll forbid them to use grammar-check and spell-check. You’ll make them write their essays by hand in class and pass their inky drafts directly to you.

But why bother? Specifically, why is it important for people to learn to read and write at all if—as your student has proven to you—we already have the technology that has rendered these skills obsolete?

Let’s look at a parallel in mathematics. I have a ten-year-old friend, Benita Lopez, who hasn’t learned the “times” tables and isn’t going to. From first grade, Benita has been trained to do math on her calculator rather than on her fingers or in her head. She thinks memorizing “times” tables, rather than using her calculator, to figure 8x8 and 9x9 is like counting seconds all day rather than using her watch to tell the time. I agree.

The watch example contains another parallel. In this age of digital clocks and watches, there are already millions of young people who depend on digital displays to tell time. They can’t tell time by looking at the hands of a clock. Is it important that they learn to read clock faces? I don’t think so. Watches and clocks represent the old technology. Many children of the Digital Age have never even heard the words “hands” and “face” applied to timepieces, and when they do, they laugh unbelievingly.

Think of it this way: is it important that we, the generation of adults who were brought up using watches with “hands” and “faces,” also be required to learn to read sundials? How many of us have ever used a sundial, or know what the shadow-making pointer in the middle of a sundial is called? Check the bottom of this page for the answer.

My ten-year-old friend, Benita, isn’t the only one who thinks it’s unnecessary for students to learn the “times” tables and other rules of applied mathematics. Today, students in grade school, high school, and college math classes are routinely required to learn to do arithmetic on calculators. Even the SAT college entrance exams have redesigned their math exams to allow for the use of calculators.

Learning arithmetic today means learning three things—one and one-half of which are calculator-related. First, it means learning the basic concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—which takes the average first grader about twenty minutes. Second, it means learning how numbers are written—another twenty minutes—and how to push the correct calculator buttons to display the desired numbers—twenty seconds. Third, it means learning which buttons to push in order to actually add, subtract, multiply, and divide the numbers—another twenty seconds.

Yet even though Benita is a wizard at using her calculator to come up with the correct answers to arithmetic problems, some adults who have watched her fingers skate across the buttons feel uneasy about it. They think that she should still be made to memorize 8x8 and 9x9. My response to them has been: why? Wouldn’t this be a huge waste of her time? Isn’t this the reason we invented calculators in the first place—so that Benita, and the rest of us, would not have to memorize the “times” tables?

No, you might be saying, it wouldn’t be a waste of her time. Memorizing the rules of arithmetic would help Benita to learn to think and reason. It would be good mental practice for her. And besides, she’ll never know when her calculator’s batteries might give out or when she might get stranded on a desert island without her calculator and need to know 8x8 and 9x9.

Bypassing the batteries-desert island issue, I’ll just say that it’s not clear to me that memorizing “times” tables would be good mental practice or mentally beneficial for Benita. It’s an example of rote learning. Learning to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers that are presented to her might have a minor role in keeping a few of her brain cells polished. However, it certainly can’t be compared to the superior mental benefits of her using critical thinking to explore some of the theoretical concepts underlying arithmetic—and then using this understanding, and further critical thinking, to solve mathematical problems. Mathematics is critical thinking with numbers.

Helping Benita and her grade school classmates to learn when, in which situations, to multiply rather than divide, subtract, or add would offer them important practice in thinking critically. Helping them to learn how to multiply, divide, subtract, or add wouldn’t really be about thinking critically, and would be better left to their calculators. Giving them the knowledge and skills to understand and think critically about a concept like “number” and its applications—now, that would benefit them mentally.

Similarly, it isn’t clear to me at all that—in the coming age of universal grammar-check, spell-check, and talking computers—memorizing rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation in order to know how to write will be mentally beneficial to anyone.

Don’t confuse our learning our native language’s grammar—which is the nexus of innate, creative mental and physical processes together with environmental processes that exists when we first learn to speak our native language—with the memorizing of the grammar rules of written language that takes place in school. It’s the latter that is the example of rote learning. Memorizing the written grammar rules for subject-verb agreement may provide modest exercise for our brains, but it doesn’t really stretch them.

The question shouldn’t be: how much is 8x8? It should be: how can we use what the calculator tells us the product of 8x8 is to help solve the problems of our world? Likewise, the question shouldn’t be: what’s the rule that guarantees that our verb agrees with our subject? It should be: how do we create thoughts and communicate them to others so that they—our thoughts and words—can help us and others to solve the problems of our world?

The spoken word can do the same work as the written word. The heard word can do the same work as the read word. Reading and writing isn’t what’s important here; thinking critically and creatively—that is, poetically, scientifically, ethically, politically, musically, artistically, environmentally, communally, self-consciously, common-sensically—and communicating, storing, and retrieving our thoughts is.

But, you may argue, we’d lose something if we didn’t read or write anymore. We’d lose the ability to think. Our thinking is tied up with our language; if we lost language, we’d lose thinking.

Yes, our thinking is tied up with our language, and if we lost language, we would lose thinking—at least as we know it. But who said anything about losing language? I’ve only suggested that the reading and writing of language will be rendered obsolete by today’s and tomorrow’s electronic technology. Actually, it’s yesterday’s technology that’s the culprit. Blame the phonograph! Language itself certainly won’t be rendered obsolete. It will be just as essential for thought and communication as ever.

This recognition is based not only on the advent of VIVO technology, but on another fact: writing and reading aren’t simply writing and reading. They’re ways we store and retrieve information. This is their primary function in human society. VIVOs will allow us to store and retrieve information faster, more accurately, and more efficiently than writing and reading. As with most other technological advances, we’ll go with the new and drop the old.

When was the last time you churned your own butter? Or even ate butter, for that matter?