The following is my opinion on technology in the modern American educational system, and the effects of said technology on America now and in the future. This was typed in on my TI-89 during precalculus in summer school on two days separated by approximately one week. Consequently, it represents a view from a student in this system. I have clearly seen the effects on numerous occasions and nothing stated below has not been observed less than three times by me, on at least three separate occasions in at least three separate classes.

Lately, technology has been introduced in increasing amounts to various subjects. The class where technology has had the most impact has been mathematics, although a few others will be discussed below. If anyting below seems sarcastic, I assure you it is not. It is rather my true feelings on the topic.

Despite enormous leaps in the capabilities and usability of calculators, nearly all students and most teachers have to be shown how to do such basic things as reaching the graph and "y=" screen. I have explained rather basic thngs covered in the first few chapters of the graphing calculator manuals on numerous occasions to most of the people in ma last two math classes. I know that the manuals are long, but they are readable. I have read the manuals for each of my four calculators cover-to-cover. That is a total of over 1300 pages. Most students set the manuals aside or even toss them out with the packaging. Its no wonder that two common tech support acronyms stand for "READ THE [censored] MANUAL!" Of those students that do read their manuals, they often just skim the first few chapters and ignore the rest. Many students put games on their calculators without considering how much time and effort is required to program any kind of game on a calculator. This requires several magnitudes more of effort than even the most complex math programs do. And yet students still complain about any bugs they may find, in some cases flaming the author about it, without providing any useful feedback for the debugging process. Many students even take their "right" to games on their calculators so far as to demand that games be restored to their calculator immediately after teir calculator crashes. They do not know or care why it crashed, just as long as they get "their" games back on.

Computers entered the curriculum of english classes recently. Many teachers now require that students type all their papers, regardless of whether or not the students own computers.

Sevral states have started requiring some form of computer literacy for graduation. However, the amount of computer literacy required is a farce because more is covered in the first half of "PCs for Dummies" than the schools require. In a class of this nature that I was in because of schduling closeouts, we were using 386DX machines for most of the year. We did get Pentium III machines at the end of the year, but crashes were common from hardware-windows issues. I was, as usual, the tech support guy for my class and some days got almost no work done because I was doing tech support.

It seems that society is turning into a technologically bipolar, hypocritical system. It is turning into a world of technological haves and have-nots. The haves are the people that can, will, and do build computers from scratch and program in a variety of languages, usually on a variety of systems. The have-nots are those who do not know how to or wish to do these things. They also tend to view the haves as social outsiders and shun them, all the while placing irrational demands on them, such as: writing complete, efficient, bugless software; making programs cross-platform compatible quickly, if not instantaneously; and, less commonly, all software free to everyone, regardless of any recipient's programming ability or lack thereof. This all boils down to the fact that we are raising a nation of PHBs and induhviduals. Unless drastic reforms are made in both education and society itself, the US will soon fall behind its more technologically-oriented trading partners, forcing the US even lower academically on an international level. As it is the center of the technlogical world is Taiwan, and the US is continually losing ground.