An Assignment on Argument

4. Now it's your turn! You are going to write an argument piece. Here is your prompt:
Educators should use authentic writing tasks rather than formulaic ones when teaching students to write.
Your task is to write an argument piece addressing this prompt. 

One of the articles we read in advance of reading this assignment:  Education Needs a Digital Age Upgrade. Other articles were about Argument v. Persuasion and an Argument Analysis handout.

I'll be writing my argument piece in a few minutes.

What do you think about term papers and the like? Archaic? Useful?  What about technology in the classroom?

There is a stat quoted in the article that I've heard before, or at least the quote with various numbers.  And it's true.  It's been true since 1965 when I was in kindergarten and likely before that, but perhaps not so quickly.  I started kindergarten in the mid-60's.  We had mimeograph machines, punch card data entry things, computers the size of bedrooms, a black rotary phones wired to the wall and cameras which used film and flashbulbs. No ATMs, no debit cards, no VISA/Mastercard.  We were taught in much the same way as our parents had been and that's still the way many students are taught, albeit with term papers typed up on the computer, or is that keyboarded?

Who would think that we'd grow up where phones, encyclopedias, cameras and friends would all live in our pocket?  Where people "tele-commuted" google docs lets multiple people in different areas work on the same paper, where we'd shop on line.

Just as we couldn't imagine the world after we graduated, what was invented and what wasn't (based on predictions), we can't imagine what is coming along for the generation of our kids and grandkids.