Slate and Slate Pencils
Digital devices are good for teachers and I am not sure whether too much of technology will be goo for kids.
Children have to use fine motor and gross motor skills as they grow.
Slate and the slate pencil were the primitive but sure way to learn finer motor skills and specially the hand writing.
In the west they are even banning cursive writing and when the grow up I cannot think of them becoming neurosurgeons (microsurgery need hand skills that are properly developed as children and not as adults) or eye surgeons.
We might have to use rots to do surgery then.
I had my granite slate till I was 25 years old and I gave it to a poor kid and he did not keep it for even three months.
In this consumerist society people do not value conservation and the amount of plastic junk we are collecting we won't be able to clean up for 100 years.
My slate was very special to me.
One side there was horizontal lines and the other side there were squares and I could practice as much as I wanted and my saliva was the best wet cleaner. My hand writing were no very good at least they were legible till I became a practicing physician and they automatically became illegible again. Point I am driving is slate was eco-friendly and there were no papers and no trees chopped down, then.
We are heralding an era of paperless and digital era and the rime is right for slate again if not digital pads.
I am not saying we much go backward what I am stressing is that manual dexterity and fine motor skills were something we developed in evolution and apes do not have these skills.
A monkey cannot open a door holding the knob and as kids we could not do that and we had to learn it and if technology retard our finer motor skills I do not know what will happen to us 100 years from now?
