I was born in 1967 and technology was pretty advanced at that time, more so during the first decade of my life.

We had rotary dial phones that took, if you were quick, around 30 seconds to dial a seven-digit number. We had color television with the three major networks, plus possibly an independent station out of St. Louis if you used that innovative and high-tech thing on top of the TV that would mechanically turn the antenna on your roof. 

One house on our block, when I was a little older, had a remote control for the television and the rest of us likened it to being able to drive a moon rover  to school. 

My cousins, who lived in Ohio, had this space-age game called “Pong” with bars that served as paddles and a blip of a ball that went back and forth as the two players battled each other.  

Did I mention that this fascinating game was on their TELEVISION?  

When I first started teaching in 1990, we had computers in one big room, and we all had a floppy disc on which we could enter grades if we wanted to. I felt so cutting edge when I would go down to the lab one day a week, type in grades, and then be able to print out a spreadsheet with grades and class percentages. 

Those spreadsheets made it easy to enter the handwritten grades on the cardboard grade cards we diligently filled out four times a year. We added nice comments on the back with outstanding and precise cursive handwriting.

Advances continued to come along. “Pong” seemed old hat after we got an Atari game system in the 1980s, a game system which lasted through the 1990s and into the 2000s when my boys, old enough to be bitten by the video game bug, were fascinated by this “old video game system my dad used to play when he was young.”

We got our first cell phone in the 1990s, and were happy that we could call from anywhere. Now, phones are used for almost anything you wish – not just for the convenience of not missing a call.

On and on it goes. Technology seems to move at such speed that the new things you buy this weekend will be outdated by the end of the month.

During COVID and remote learning, I learned how to teach to a screen of kids who all had cameras and audio on their laptops.  I learned to show them educational videos and paused each video to insert notes or my own narration.

I learned to make online tests and skill pages that kids could put answers on and then submit them to me. There were even programs that would score the tests and assignments for you if you did it right.

Most of this I learned over night with trial and error and under great duress. I’m glad those days are behind me and you’d be surprised how much of it I’ve forgotten.

And that’s just the thing.  Sometimes I didn’t do it right and sometimes it was so much that once I was finished doing it, I forgot it all. We have been so inundated with technology that it makes our head spin.  

“My head isn’t spinning,” say the kids born in the 21st century.

Nobody really gets it.  Those of us born from the late 1960s well up into the 1980s were not born with the wherewithal to operate in this new-fangled world.  We don’t pick up things as quickly as you whippersnappers.  

Heck, we once found just operating a mouse challenging.

Indeed, some of my friends have recently gone back to school to get more education (I can’t even imagine this!) and thought they may need counseling to deal with how quickly people were flying around the technology universe, knowing how to snap and code and twit and insta.  

It’s like we are in a cartoon, standing still, while the other cartoon characters swirl around in an animated whirlwind.   

Yes, we are technology tweeners. You must be patient with us.  We don’t pick it up as quickly as you do.

But yes, we DO laugh at those a little older than us who can’t operate their cell phones.