Here's a quarter ...

Hi friends, 

Allow me a moment to share you with my latest, "I feel old" moment. 

The scene: It's Friday afternoon around lunch time and the yearbook club is meeting. It's a great group of kids (yearbook is a club where students miss their lunch break on Fridays to put together the book ... so you can imagine the group of kids who would be attracted to that. Awesome group!) 

One of my students, Mikey, is downloading about 250 pictures to my computer. Sydney is standing next to Mikey and I'm sitting at my computer watching the photos. Sydney pulls a quarter out of her pocket and makes a statement like, "Wow, here's a quarter ..." Sydney has a great sense of humor so I follow up her statement with "... call someone who cares!" I was joking, of course and then I started laughing. It wasn't long before I realized no one else was laughing. 

It had nothing to do with the fact that the statement wasn't funny (although I suppose that was the case, t00) Instead, I got blank stares from both Mikey and Sydney. Why? THEY HAD NO IDEA WHAT THE PHRASE MEANT! In fact, they'd never used a pay phone before. In a world with cell phones, why would anyone need a pay phone? 

I had to take a step back and laugh again ... not at a joke, but at the way things have changed. I can remember the 8-track tapes my parents played when I was a kid, the VHS and BETA tapes that were available at the video store and the first VCR we owned that (gasp!) had a remote control. (The remote had to plug into the VCR and the cord was rather short, but still ...) My high school students have probably never seen at 8-track, heard of BETA or lived in a world without a remote. Heck, even our kids (at 6, 4 and 4) ask to hear the iPod or to send an email or a text message! 

I know I'm not old and I know that everyone has stories like this to share, but the quarter story certainly made me take a step back. 

Happy Monday. :) 

--M