I was talking with a lady in her seventies, and we share a certain wonder.
She said that I was breaking up on her cell phone, so she had to use her land line.
This will not strike you younger folks as anything strange, but it gave me a revelation.
When I called her on her land line, I pointed out that she and I knew what a “land line” IS.
I then said, “You know, when you and I were kids, it would never occurred to us that we would do more learning after age sixty than we did when we were six years old.”
Land line, attachment, DVD as opposed to VCR, Favorites, Page Up, download, upload, you don’t have the room on a floppy disk (which NEVER flops) so you have to use the E drive, remember that you need a CD-R disk for that, you hit “Quote” when any fool know you should have hit “New Thread.”
And on and on and on.
Every word of this would have been Greek to us a decade ago.
So we LOVE to complain about it.
What you young people may find hard to believe is that we enjoy the HELL out of all this.
We exercise the human prerogative of bitching, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.
When we were young, learning consisted of repetition.
You can recite the ABCs today. But you cannot remember what an agony it was to repeat them and repeat them and repeat them.
If you want to torture a child, you can put them on the rack or you can make them mindlessly repeat the same thing over and over and over.
Which one is crueler?
It’s a toss-up.
Remember the boredom you experienced when learning the multiplication tables?
Of course you don’t.
Memory blocks out agony like that.
Remember the pain of each baby tooth coming out?
Ditto.
Us old folks bitch and complain about how Kindergarten kids find computers natural, while we have to grunt and groan to learn them.
Us old folks love to groan about how much energy kids have and how slow we are.
But would we would have it any other way?
Try taking away a child’s natural energy and who would attack you violently?
We would.
Young people learn this modern stuff easily. It’s WORK for us.
We love to bitch about it.
But if you tried to even things out by making it harder on the kids, we’d kill you.
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