I also wish a device like the remarkable was like 25% of the price. That is the epitome of proctored tech.
Your frustration is because something (teaching computer technology) is not being done right as you would define it. The three natural responses to this problem are to argue to a) stop doing it (the wrong way), b) fix it (to the right way), or c) ignore it (not my problem). Iâd argue from experience that we cannot afford to ignore cases where teaching is ineffective or incorrect, and we cannot afford to stop teaching altogether simply because some cases are ineffective or incorrect. Knowing however that you cannot always fix things so that students arrive with everything they need, you are left with a challenge. How you fix your own lessons to accommodate that they will arrive without the knowledge and skills that you require? This challenge is not unique.
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Thatâs because theyâre no longer new, their level of complexity is far in excess of 30 years ago when I was in school (I get that the basics are still similar), and theyâre now relatively easy to use for the majority of people.
Theyâre just a standard part of life. Babies and Toddlers pick up a computer (phone/tablet) and use them by mimicing what theyâve seen rather than any training
People donât get taught how a drill works, or a car. Theyâre something you use to achieve an end. Of course later in education we train mechanics, electricians and appliance engineers to ensure that these things continue to work, and thereâs nothing to stop anyone else learning about them if they wish to.
Of course if someone shows an aptitude or interest then they can be guided into learning how computers work, but itâs no longer appropriate to force everyone to learn about them.
One of the examples that just sprang to mind is the difference between RAM (memory) and Storage on a device. IOSâ active management has effectively hidden RAM, virtually no-one using an iPhone or iPad thinks about it until people like us cotton on because it will likely stop 1 year old devices (iPhones, not iPhone Pro) running at least some Apple Intelligence features.
But even with PCs and Macs I still get the odd question from family and friends who did the same computing training I did. âI want to buy this has it got 16GB or 1TB of storageâ
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Agree 100%.
True story. When I was in high school (early-/mid-90s) I had a laptop. An (even by the standards of the time) outdated laptop (I think it was an 8086 with a CGA mono screen), but a laptop nonetheless.
I had it because I had poor handwriting due to small motor issues. This didnât prevent me from writing my name on a piece of paper or taking a multiple-choice quiz or anything, but long-form writing actively causes me physical symptoms. Writing things by hand, after about 15-20 minutes of sustained writing, starts causing escalating numbness in my hand, moving up my arm, etc. This makes my already-poor writing even worse. So I had formal permission (my parents had talked to admin about it) to use my laptop in class for note-taking and such.
We had a teacher in an English class who graded papers in stages. Rough draft was X percent, a middle draft was Y percent, and the final draft was about half of the grade. Iâd printed out the middle and final drafts and handed them in, but Iâd never printed out my âroughâ draft. She failed me on the whole paper as she wouldnât accept any future drafts without the rough draft, and when I told her Iâd try to find an old copy of the file she made it clear that she wouldnât accept ANY rough draft unless it was 100% hand-written. No administrator was going to tell her differently - rough drafts were hand-written. Full stop.
I worry that modern business/academia is getting prescriptive in the other direction. The canonical example of that, IMHO, is an old HBR article:
https://hbr.org/2013/01/dear-colleague-put-the-noteboo.html
The gist is, âI donât care about your arguments. Doing it any way other than my way is a waste of everybodyâs time, and youâre wrong for doing it your way.â
As I see it, the challenge is that lots of people are being prescriptive. But theyâre not doing the diagnosis that would lead to a valid prescription, which has a name in a number of fields - âmalpractice.â
This is back to middle school math. If you canât put your solution back into the original problem and have it work, then itâs not the solution. 
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I donât doubt thatâs true for most people, but itâs the opposite for me, probably due to my ADHD. Iâve used both extensively, and I consistently pay better attention and retain more information during lectures and presentations when I take notes with a keyboard than when I handwrite them.
PCs didnât exist yet when I finished school but a decade later I found myself teaching people to use a computer for the first time. FWIW all my notes in school were hand written and I still prefer to write notes, on an iPad or paper, rather than type them.
When it comes to technology I believe it is more important that people understand the basics of how a computer works, than to know how to use a particular piece of software. It took people a while to learn to use Lotus 1-2-3 and their DOS computers but most managed to switch to Windows and Excel with very little help. And I found that most Windows users only needed a five minute introduction to get started on an iMac: the Dock is your Start Menu, System Preferences is the Control Panel, there are no drive letters but this icon is your C: drive, etc.
Practicing high school social studies teacher here! I find my students prefer to do stuff on paper. I then ask them to take pictures of their work and submit it to our Google Classroom (that proves to be an enormous hassle for them, heh). This also puts a little bit of a wall up against leaning on LLMs too much, but certainly isnât a magic bullet.