Wednesday, June 12, 2019

What year was that?


 Today I had one of those sudden moments that hit you about age. We were talking about essays in high school and I was recalling how much I hated when a teacher would say, "alright class, I want a three thousand word essay on"... I joked about installing many filler words like "and, when, the, then" etc just to get the count up. Half way through the teacher would say, "no using words over and over to get your count up, you will lose marks if you do"!

 A young man I work with of twenty four, said that if I had only know there is a program that I could have used, it helps a student extend his essay by suggesting words and phrases to add in without looking like you are doing this and upsetting the teacher. I had to think for a second. Then I said sadly, "when I was in high school, computers hadn't been invented yet". That reality shocked me, especially since they are everywhere now. To be honest, yes they were starting to make an appearance by the end of my high school days, I was even in a computer class but in my early high school days, computers were only something on Star Trek.

11 comments:

Ur-spo said...

I never seem to need to 'fill up' with words; I have the problem to cut them down.

Debra She Who Seeks said...

Home computers weren't even a twinkly in Bill Gates' eye when I went to high school. It's possible Bill Gates himself wasn't even alive then.

Debra She Who Seeks said...

I meant "twinkle" of course. And it turns out that Bill Gates is two years older than me! Sheesh, who knew?

Deedles said...

We were still taking typing in high school and we weren't allowed to use calculators. Our forty-fifth high school reunion is this year. It's well past my bedtime.

Leanna said...

OMG! Talk about age dating. Sheesh!
Home computers didn't come on sale for almost 25 years after I graduated. I think that was like 50 years after the dinosaurs died off and then color was invented. Yeah, I remember it like only yesterday.

anne marie in philly said...

like deedles, typing (on manual, not electric typewriters) and no calculators in high school (1968-1972). I didn't get my first home computer until 1998.

Bob said...

Computers i high school? What the what? We used an abacus in math class and carved our essays into stone tablets!

Sixpence Notthewiser said...

When it comes to technology, it’s leaps and bounds in just a few years. We have Grammarly, for the typing impaired (your, you’re and the such) we have voice recognition and the lot. It’s incredible what school districts -with money- can provide to students. And don’t get me started with how technology has helped plagiarism and cheating. And this in the last five years, so don’t feel too out of touch.

XoXo

Deedles said...

Wow! Bob is older than he looks! He is still very hot for such an ancient :)

Old Lurker said...

Computers weren't invented when you were in school? Were you in high school during the Second World War? Konrad Zuse invented the Z3 in 1941. I knew you looked young for your age, but I did not realize you looked that young.

Richard said...

When I started my career last century, every desk had an IBM Selectric typewriter. We used carbon paper because we didn't have copy machines.