Can anyone help me break down this essay question?

[Marnie]

"Mankind in now a slave to technology. It creates the problems which are destroying our planet".

I need to do an essay for a subject in university and i've never been a good one for starting an essay. I need to write an annotated bibliography by next week citing 8 authors that back up my claims.

Trouble is it seems like such a deep question to me so I'm having a bit of trouble starting. I was thinking of doing social media addiction and how society is losing its ability to communicate but my lecture said "boring, overdone", so no.

So I started to think maybe about how society is losing our 'life skills' and how that may be our downfall (like who knows how to change a tyre anymore?) but i don't know! Can anybody help!

[Phil Taylor]

Your example is a good one, changing tyres. Most people these days can't do this once-easy task.

Many other skills are also becoming lost: letter-writing (texting), writing (keyboards), spelling (spell-checkers and abbreviations), family-communication (TV and radio) and much more.

Our environment is being destroyed by pollution, over-use of materials, deforestation, over-hunting and more.

Go for it!

[Amanda]

Maybe talk about technology in education. I'm a high school teacher and though I love technology and using it in my classroom, I hate it just as much. It both makes this easier and more difficult. Examples you can talk about in your essay:

- Students rely too heavily on the internet for resources (specifically Google and Wikipedia, and they can't decipher what is a scholarly and credible source and what is not.)
- Students are forgetting how to write. All they can do is type, and forget about writing cursive.
- Everyone in the education system relies on email or phone calls as a source of keeping in touch. There are rarely face to face parent teacher conferences anymore - at least not the way there used to be
- Kids have their phones and the phones have an app for everything. They don't have to solve a problem without a calculator, they don't have to look at a map, look anything up in a book, or tell time by an analog clock (it's scary how many of them CAN'T), etc.

Find two authors who discuss each point and you're good to go! The best part? This all fits into you losing life skills idea - people lose the ability to communicate in person, use resources around them (what if some how, some way the Internet just crashes one day - how would they know anything?).

Something else to consider - I don't know where you're located, but in Virginia we have the SOL tests which basically consume every student and teacher's life and make it a living hell. Standardized testing is changing with technology and becoming more and more "important" to somebody, somewhere, who gets paid the big bucks to make it so. This results in kids pulled from their electives classes (all your Career and Technical ed classes, psychology, communications, graphic design, fine arts and music, etc) for remediation. This is where the life skills are being lost. How is the kid who only attends my Culinary Arts class once a week going to make it as a chef after high school? How is he even going to know the proper behavior for a workplace or provide customer service in his job as a waiter that he gets while studying to be a chef? yes, he can be trained but wouldn't it be great to already have the skill going in? If I'm the manager-that's the kid I'm hiring. If he can't perform the simple tasks of an entry-level position, just because he lacks the life experience and communication and workplace skills, he's not going to last long enough to be promoted. The system that embraces all the technology is helping students in the academic world - absolutely - but setting students up to fail in the real world. But hey, at least they know the Pythagorean theorem because they missed so many other classes to learn it.


* I promise I'm not a bitter old teacher who hates the system. I actually don't get very involved in the politics of it. I show up and plan my lessons and crack some jokes and give some pep talks, but when it comes to b.s.ing an essay for a yahoo friend, I can come up with all kinds of things to say. use whatever you like from this post and good luck!