I am not an Old People person. I don't know what this is going to mean for me as I become an old person myself (although according to my students I reached that mark at least 10 years ago), but as it stands now, I just can't do it. I really admire people who can talk super slowly and super loudly and about the same subjects over and over and over. But I am not one of those people. Now, of course there are exceptions to this. I love swapping emails with my grandmother and I'm always up for a Golden Girls marathon. But overall, there is a certain pace at which I need my life and my conversations to move, and old people just don't fit into that equation.
I bring this up because there is a lady at my work who is about one hundred and fifteen years old. I'm guessing. She is a very sweet lady, and I appreciate the fact that her glasses are the same size as her head, much like the Queen. But you know, the woman cannot for the life of her work a computer, and this drives me up the wall. She has told me she can't seem to send an email to someone, and I look over to discover she is trying to type their email address into the browser window. Or she asks me how to do something like print a document. Like a word document. Like the kind of thing you just press the "print" button for. And I think what gets me the most is that I'm usually the one who ends up looking stupid. Consider this conversation:
Old Lady: Kath-a-ryn (this is how she always says my name)
Me: Yes, Old Lady?
OL: I just got an email from someone all the way up in New York. But I can only see the first line. How do I open it?
Me: How do you...what?
OL: Open it. I would like to open it and see the rest of the email.
Me: Well right but...you click it.
OL: Click it? What do you mean?
Me: Like click...with your mouse. <-- notice how stupid I am starting to sound.
There is only so much I know how to break down. I don't know how to further explain the concept of "clicking".
Ok, but the point of all of this is not to make fun of an old lady who, I understand, did not grow up with computers. It's to say...it's amazing to me how generations change. Because it's not just that she didn't grow up with computers. It's that she didn't grow up having to constantly learn and adapt to new technologies. I didn't grow up with Twitter or Google +, but I did grow up learning that things change at a rapid pace and you better get comfortable with teaching yourself how to open an email. So when Twitter etc emerged, it wasn't scary and it wasn't overwhelming and I didn't automatically think to myself that it was the realm of the kiddoes. I thought, "gee whiz I can't wait to see how congressmen make idiots out of themselves with this new technology."
Not really. I would never think "Gee whiz".
But I think we should be keeping our eyes out for how this is going to impact schools and politics. The idea that schools should look a certain way because they always have and always will is fading. Check out this story from Slate, where they try to use crowdsourcing to design a modern classroom. Are desks necessary? Walls? Teachers? It's all on the table.
Oh and for somewhere I went this week: Station 4. Go there for brunch. Enjoy the people watching. Stay out of the heat. Ask for homefries.
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