I am a 25-year veteran educator focusing on English Language Arts and its ability to forge relationships with each curriculum content item in the education industry. Too often there is a "fad", such as the current push to make STEM the buzz-word for 21st century education. While STEM has its value, we cannot overlook the tried and true foundation of education, which is reading and writing. Often, there is an overabundance of attention shown to the new "creature comforts" in technology, while the students that embrace this technology, which makes life easier, find themselves reading, writing and spelling more poorly than students in the 20th century.Something is wrong with this picture. Students are advancing in their ability to access information at break-neck speeds, yet cannot process it effectively when they retrieve it. Overall, the juniors and seniors that I teach struggle with spelling because of texting and resist reading lengthy articles because of video. Finally, the solution I see is to get back to "old school" methods of close-reading and cursive writing for remediation.