Electrical Institutes: We never lose papers or pens.

BarcelonaTechnology is modernity, the future, and prosperity. Everyone has bought into this premise, including the educational world. Everyone from gurus to politicians has promoted it in recent decades. We had to forget the methodologies of the past. We had to leave behind the way our grandparents or parents learned to write with the inkwell on their desk (and what magnificent handwriting they did!). Or how I thrived in school with tracing paper and a typewriter (I tried not to make mistakes so I wouldn't have to repeat the entire page!). As a teacher, over the last twenty years I've seen paper books forgotten and replaced by laptops. How computer labs became obsolete and were repurposed for other needs. How we took attendance on various electronic devices and how whiteboards and projectors gave way to giant, touch-screen, interactive television screens. How, little by little, we left all the documents we generated in the immateriality of the cloud. Or how online meetings during the pandemic helped us stay on track. All of these have been tools that have given us new options and conveniences, but they have also exponentially multiplied bureaucracy and hours of dedication. Every Monday, early in the morning, the emails you must urgently and urgently answer fall onto your screen like a green waterfall. Matrix.

For the sake of detail, a couple of years ago I visited a school that rejected 21st-century technology. They did everything with chalk, paper, and pencils. They took advantage of the daylight hours and were surrounded by nature. I thought it was too much of a bubble to apply to my children, although I found some of the "disconnections" very interesting and even necessary to curb the ultra-connected, almost crazy world we have outside the classroom. For example, the use of mobile phones in schools has recently been banned. We are clear that it is a source of distraction and conflict. Now we still have to think about how we want to limit and control the use of artificial intelligence, or we will definitively bury the culture of effort, and doing homework and projects will be pointless. I myself, like most of my colleagues, have everything in Xtec email and I upload my work to Classroom. In Catalonia, teaching is in the hands of Google. If we lose power, our programming is rendered useless, but fortunately, teachers always have analog resources. We never lose paper or pens... nor a critical eye and a human voice for our students. No matter the century.