"When I was your age blah blah blah..."

I have a confession.

No I'm not an alcoholic.

Well... okay, yes, I have resorted to a glass of wine every now and then while marking.

Only one, and only in desperation.

Okay that one time it was two, but if you had read some of those answers you would've finished that bottle!! 

But back to my confession:

When I was in school, my peers and I would roll our eyes anytime a teacher would say "You know, in MY day, we never had cellphone etc etc blah blah fishpaste", and I always vowed I'd never become like that.

And yet, at the ripe old age of 23, I find my teenaged sponges just so DIFFERENT...  In my school days we certainly didn't have smartphones, camera phones which slid open would be the coolest of the cool. We certainly didn't like male popstars that look like overgrown babies (not mentioning names here... cough...) or skip school to watch their concerts. We would've been caught dead in neon see-through shirts and shorts that were designed to make half your butt fall out. We actually knew how to use the dewy decimal system in the library and projects weren't just copied and pasted off the net.

But my students know nothing of this life. And I feel the urgent need to remind them of a time when life wasn't all Blackberrys and Ipads. 

So, I confess, I found myself the other day musing out loud: "You know girls, back when I was in school, we didn't have half the things you did, Facebook was only invented when I was almost out of high school!", in response a very sweet, quiet girl in the front row pipes up: "Wow miss, you must really be OLD!"

Sigh.

I think I'll go back to my knitting.