Friday, June 3, 2011

ipod and ipad confuse children because of the use of "i"

This is halarious... and sad. I found this on a blog and the article is called "I think Apple is affecting children's grammer."

"I want to relate an interesting story my brother told me the other day about one fascinating -- and negative -- way Apple is affecting children in the classroom. My brother is a grade school teacher, and recently he's noticed an alarming trend in his students' grammar, specifically capitalization. It started a few years ago. My brother would review a sentence one of his students wrote, and it would read, "i went on a walk with my mom.

One day last week, when his students had turned in their short story assignments, my brother graded them over recess and noticed that the dreaded lowercase "i" was incorrectly capitalized in more papers than ever. When his students came back from recess, he asked them why so many of them weren't capitalizing their I's, even when they began a sentence with the pronoun "I." The first reply: "Because iPod is spelled that way." The other children agreed that's why they do it as well, though some attributed it to the iPhone or iPad.

That's when my brother realized it's hard for seven, eight and nine-year-olds to understand the concept of branding and marketing (but not advertising), and therefore it's hard for them to make the connection that "iPod" with a lowercase I is capitalized correctly, but "i am going on a walk" is not. He also realized it's now an uphill battle to teach young children the proper way to use capitalization when most of today's popular electronics begin with a lowercase I."

You can read the whole blog post by clicking on the article title at the top. This sure is something! Kids are spelling other things wrong as well, points out the blogger -- thanks to brand names deliberately spelled wrong. Oh, America. What shall we do!

On another Apple topic, I broke my iPod touch today. It fell out of my bag when I was getting out of the subway and although it was in a case it fell out of that (just a cloth one I got off of Etsy) and it fell onto the nice hard ground. The glass cracked all over the place. The thing still works but I had to put clear plastic tape over the top so that the glass wouldn't fall off. I don't think it'll last for much longer. One mishap and my 400 dollar iPod is gone! And I wonder -- what makes people think that their 3 and 4 year olds can handle an iPad? One drop and that glass top is gone! Since I work as a cashier I see the glass shattered tops all the time when people put down their electronics to pay. It's a big problem. Apple: plastic perhaps? Something less shatterproof? If you want to go into the children's market you need to think childproof here! One more reason to buy a book I say. That and the fact that kids don't know how to capitalize anymore.

1 comment:

  1. Brand names deliberately spelled wrong: I always think of the part in one of the Ramona books where Beezus laughs about how one of her classmates spells "relief": R-O-L-A-I-D-S and Ramona is puzzled as to why that is funny.

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