On the way home from school, I usually ask my 13-year-old son how his day went. And sometimes he even answers in a constructive and informative way. Like the other day.
“In Spanish, we danced,” he said. Good, because he is probably a lot better at dancing than he is at conjugating.
“Oh, right, you told me about that,” I said. “The samba?”
“No, the salsa.”
“Ah, right.”
“And you know who we danced with?”
“Your friends?”
“No. Girls. And it was a lot of fun.”
“Wow, tough day. Had to dance, huh? Was this for a grade?”
“Yeah, I think so. And I did pretty well. Didn’t forget any of the steps, and there were a lot of them.”
“Man, school sure has changed. In the old days, we were graded on stuff like tests and homework. Now all you have to do is dance.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” Bryson said. “I wish I went to school back when you did. It was so easy. Now we have way more stuff to learn because so much more has happened. And with technology and stuff, things are way harder.”
I thought about this. In Social Studies, Bryson has been studying the Civil War and reconstruction. I wondered how much more history has been uncovered by the latest technology. And surely the atomic structure of water has changed as science has benefited from the wonders of technology.
So I called him on it.
“You really think so?” I said.
“Yeah, definitely. You had it so much easier. Stuff was way simpler. Now there is all this stuff we have to learn.”
“OK, let me tell you my side and see if you still agree. When I went to school, there were no computers. That meant if I needed some information on a report, I couldn’t go into my bedroom, turn on a machine and enter a few words.
“I had to go to a library. Not a media center filled with even more computers that are there so you never really have to look at a book. Which, honestly, I still don’t get.
“But at the library, that was just the start. I would have to use a card catalog to look up a subject, and on those cards would be the names of books, and each one would have a number. I would have to write those numbers down and go find them in the shelves, and after 10 minutes of looking I would find that the book wasn’t there, it had been checked out, because everybody else in my class doing a report wanted that book. And if the book was there, I would take it back to a desk and start searching through it, page by page, looking for information I needed. If I found it, I would either have to copy it by hand or wait in a long line at the copier, where at guy at the front of the line was trying to find change for a buck because he ran out of nickels, and that’s only if it was on those rare occasions where the copier was actually working.
“Now as there were no computers, we had to type our reports. When you made a mistake, you had to stop, get some White Out, paint out the error, and type over it. Odds were you’d make the very same mistake again. I used enough White Out in college to paint a house.
“And then there was math. Which, by the way, hasn’t changed all that much unless technology has made 2 + 2 = 3.539 or something. It’s not that we couldn’t use calculators. It’s that they weren’t even invented yet.”
(That was true until my freshman year in high school when the head resident of our dorm bought a four-function handheld calculator with futuristic LED lights. It was amazing. We’d plug in all sorts of problems, mostly multiplication and division because that was a higher functioning math. We even had an engineering student test it. “OK, 469 times 732, what is it?” “Hang on, let’s see … yeah, and carry … I’ve got 343,308.” “Dude, yeah, the calculator had it right and in way less time, this is amazing!”)
“And even when he had calculators, they didn’t do much beyond add and subtract. You may get into math that involves logarithms and cosines, and we had to figure out all that with charts and graphs and slide rules.
“And you know how you can tell a computer to do just about anything? My college only had one computer, and you had to write instructions on these cardboard punch cards, sometimes as many as 200 or so, and then turn them in for the computer guys to feed into the machine. And you’d come back the next day hoping your program worked, only usually it didn’t and you’d have to find out which cards didn’t work and start all over. And these were programs that just counted. Counted!
“Oh, and Spanish is still pretty much Spanish, despite all your fancy technology. Only now there are Web sites to tell you what words mean, and some that will translate pages (though not very well). Still think it’s a lot tougher now?”
“Huh, what? So some kids had to dance with girls in another class because there are more boys than girls in Spanish. I danced with Samantha, Justine, Audrey and one more I forget her name.”
“So you had a good time?”
“Yeah, I said it was fun. Weren’t you listening?”
