I used to think about the changes my grandparents had seen over their lifetimes. They were born in 1901 and 1903, always lived in the same town and lived into ripe old age (89 and 98) so they spanned the twentieth century.
I knew my great-grandparents also, who were born in the 1870s and 80s and were alive until I was an adult. There are some long livers in my maternal family ---- why some of them are THIS long! Never mind. Old joke.
But here's the thing. My own experience with being about a week shy of 63 years old ---- which would have been old age, statistically, when my grandparents were born ----- is that it's difficult to acknowledge the changes that have occurred since August of 1950. Of course, it took a few years for me to wake up to the world at large. I wasn't that precocious. But objectively, I know from looking at photographs and watching movies from that era, that the world looked different in 1950 than it does in 2013. Material culture has changed a lot. Cars, clothing, tools, farm equipment, electronics ---- just the stuff of everyday life is very different.
Expectations are different, too. The way that people interact has changed significantly. Measures of acceptable behavior and appearance ---- just think, T-shirts then were always white and were underwear. That alone is a revolution.
I've been considering going back to work, at least part time. I've done a lot of jobs in my life, but education is the consistent theme. I don't want to return to the madness of public school teaching, but maybe pre-school would work. Yesterday I was listening to an NPR program about "screen time" for kids, and how addictive it can be, and how it tends to crowd out other activities, including human interaction. I thought about recent conversations with current teachers in the system, and the amount of technology that is involved, both with the kids and for paperwork, and it made me realize that I've dinosaured out of that world.
When I went back into the classroom for the final stint in 2002, I was issued a laptop, I had four bulky computers for the students, and for the most part, it was all optional. I was scared of the laptop ---- I figured I would break it or lose it ---- so I left it in the case all year. There were "paperwork" tasks I had to do on the computer, everything from taking attendance to recording grades, but most of my recordkeeping was still confined to a loose leaf notebook liberally sprinkled with sticky notes. The children had about three places they could go on the computer, learning games, no internet, and were allotted 20 minute slots twice a week.
By the time I left teaching in 2011 the technology was an important part of student learning, all of my recordkeeping was electronic, and we were on the cusp of an explosion of even more involvement for both students and teachers. Would I even be able to keep up if I were still in the classroom? If I had to. Would it add to the already overburdening and stressful environment? Undoubtedly.
So what effect is all this having on child development? Do the brains of children who are given Mom's ipad to play with at 12 months get wired differently than mine was? The most oft-told story of my infancy was how I killed a mouse with a beer bottle in our apartment when I was 9 months old. No electronic killing on the screen for me --- I had the real thing!
The narrator on the NPR program lamented that children don't play outside like they once did. They don't engage in deep pretend games much anymore. In many homes, one screen or another (or many at once) are operating during all activities, including mealtimes, car rides and bedtimes. I can hear the sigh of relief from overstressed parents who love the DVD in the back seat instead of listening to "Mo - om, he touched me!" But I do wonder. If they don't fight in the back seat, when do they practice problem solving?
I do not want to sound curmudgeonly --- "Well, in MY day. . . " because I think that every generation is born into one world, develops in another, and grows old in another. Hasn't it always been so? And yet, it seems that change happens so quickly, too quickly I'm afraid, for me to keep up. Whether I want to or not, I find myself not just sidelined, but actually perplexed by things that must be quite ordinary for people a generation or more behind me. And the most perplexing thing of all is that inside I still feel so young, so with-it, so ME!
No comments:
Post a Comment