Class Decorum

I grew up in a different era, for sure.

It was a time of "command and control," and school kids generally did what their teachers told them (not asked them) to do. Despite all the rules, we grew up to be a pretty creative generation, I think.

Although we didn't invent Facebook and we pretty much made a mess of the economy, we (not me personally) discovered cures for diseases, manufactured small smart devices, and wrote some epic screenplays. And many of us have awesome penmanship and phone and interpersonal skills which come in handy during hurricanes and when the servers go down.

Hard as it may be to believe, boys and girls, here are some of the realities of life in the 1960s: We couldn't call teachers by their first names (ever) and they never gave us the "rubric" they were using to grade tests. In fact, rubric back then would be translated to "give a massage to someone named Richard." The girls had to wear skirts to school every day. When it was below freezing, we could wear pants under our skirts. We also had to take "Home Ec," Sewing and Childccare rather than Wood Shop, Electrical Shop, or Auto Shop. I always wanted to build a lamp with popsicle sticks (like my guy friends did) but it was forbidden.

We had to do math in our heads. No calculators were permitted in class. Slide rules were allowed later on, I suppose. We got to play in the street, without fear of drive-by shootings, kidnapping, or disease-carrying mosquitos. A visit from Good Humor was as exciting as the release of a new iPhone app. We engaged in "Spin the Bottle" and the term "hook-up" was a term only uttered in electrical shop, when the popsicle stick lamp was plugged into a wall outlet.

We had to do lots of stuff on our own -- get to the library (a physical building) to do research, figure out how to apply to college and make our own beds when we got there, and create fake IDs without the benefit of personal copier machines. We had to listen to music in groups. We had no iPods or earbuds. And because we had vinyl rather than mixes, we had to stand up and move to "change the record." We didn't play many competitive sports, so that was exercise for us.

And yeah, we were restless and bored and impatient and angry. But we never thought of ourselves as depressed or hyperactive. "It was the best of times...it was the worst of times," to quote one of my favorite tomes about revolution. And I read it in paperback, not as a download or Sparknotes. Revolution and evolution are great in many ways, but so is nostalgia.

I wonder if Charles Dickens had an iPad if he'd have penned his masterpiece while sitting in a foreign country (like I am as I'm writing this post). Or whether he just would have posted "It is a far better thing that I do #frenchrevolution #FF @madamedefarge" on his Twitter feed.

Let's bring back good penmanship!  Click here!

How to make a popsicle stick lamp

Yearbook yourself! and travel back in time.

Comments

[Timberland UK Online]

It's great to hear from you and see what you've been up to. In your blog I feel your enthusiasm for life. thank you.