7 15 03

As
a kid I remember listening to my parents and grandparents talk
about how hard they had it in school. I suppose every parent in
this country lived in some place where… it snowed every year
(even in Arizona) and you had to walk five miles to school
uphill. (Even in Kansas). I can’t tell you how many times I
heard about hot class rooms and bad food or overcrowded classes.
To hear them tell it, school was horrible.

So, since I
didn’t have to suffer these various tragedies, how can I carry
on this tradition and compare my school days to those currently
being experienced by my kids and grandkids? Well, it’s simple.
The kids today have it entirely too easy. Why, these kids have
backpacks to carry their books and supplies. We didn’t have
anything like those. You had to carry your books in your hands
or leave them in your lockers. Oh, to be sure some kids carried
their books in some sort of a satchel, but they were the
exceptions, not the rule. Besides, it didn’t look cool. Imagine
having all of your pens, pencils, tablets, workbooks and
whatever in one place with you all of the time. Sheer luxury.

Lunches…while
we did have a school cafeteria, hardly anyone ate there since
the  food was prepared by former World War II mess sergeants who
had been forced to leave the service for some type of medical
disability such as deafness or blindness. I suspect our meals
may have been better prepared if the cooks and their assistants
(think Igor, as in Frankenstein’s assistant) could have heard
our complaints or been able to read the recipes or ingredient
labels. Baking soda and salt may both be white, but the
similarity stops there. How any half way intelligent person
could burn Jell-O I still cannot figure out to this day.

No, we carried
our lunches in brown paper bags, not these fancy insulated
coolers these spoiled brats have today. If someone had a greasy
hamburger, you could spot it coming from 20 steps. To keep your
drinks cold you had to wrap the can in tinfoil and freeze it the
night before. Then you hoped it would thaw out before lunch
otherwise you had to try and suck whatever was in the can out
piece by piece. Tell that to the kids today. Talk about abuse.
These kids can just walk up a machine in the hallway and buy a
Coke.

Would I have
died for a hand held calculator? Math was never my strong suit,
and was nearly my downfall as far as my finally graduating. We
had to perform intricate calculations where you were required to
actually multiply and divide large numbers in YOUR HEAD without
the use of any device. Talk about tough. When you go into the
stores today you can tell who was trained in the old way (me)
versus who was trained in the new way (them). You give the clerk
a $1.00 for some purchase of $.97 and if the cash register is
broken or computer is down, she or he cannot figure out how to
give you .03 back in change. Try asking one of them to multiply
12 x 12 and then divide it in half and see how their eyes glaze
over. They immediate start searching for that hand held device
which they have become addicted to using ever since they started
to school. When their batteries give out they are thrown into a
panic.

Computers?
Don’t even start. These kids today want to find out something,
then all they have to do is log on and grab a search engine and
then it’s laid out nice and neat for them. In my day, we didn’t
have anything close to this. We had the WORLD BOOK ENCYCLOPEDIA
and you had to actually take the book from the shelf and THUMB
though it to find out some facts. In some cases there wasn’t
enough information and you might have to go to a place called
the LIBRARY and look the subject up in several books. What would
happen then? Then you would have to MANUALLY write what you had
researched in a notebook and then again WRITE the report out in
something we called LONGHAND. You couldn’t just put everything
into a computer and then print the report.