When I was growing up, computers, technology, and the internet were mysterious, alien, burgeoning things. I, and everyone I knew, regarded them with skepticism and incredulity. What were they all about? There was an air of magic, of allure, of the unknown about them that I think young people these days are completely unaware of. I think they are regarded more as facts of life rather than curious contraptions that may or may not ever become important. Interestingly, I was an (I hate this word) “early adopter” of technology in some ways. For instance, I had a laptop in school when almost NO ONE had a laptop. I think perhaps one other person in my whole school regularly brought a computer to class with which to take notes.

I just substitute taught a class at a middle school and it was hard to ignore the fact that every single cotton picking one of the kids I was teaching had a school distributed laptop computer. So, yeah, not much mystery or uniqueness about something everyone has… And obviously, they all had internet access. I think at one point, I bought a modem which could be used wirelessly with my laptop but that was a very new-fangled thing when I got it. Perhaps even more amazing is how quickly that new-fangled thing became completely outdated and abandoned when laptops started coming equipped standard with wireless modems and later, WiFi.

What I’m trying to get at is the idea of technology feeling a bit alien, a bit unusual, a bit nerdy, and definitely uncommon. It seems that now, it really is none of those things. I mean, obviously, there are still places in the world where technology is not quite so ubiquitous but man, times have sure changed if you ask me. Other kids in my class would often make fun of me, if I remember correctly, for even using a laptop in school. At that time, a lot of kids still hand-wrote essays and assignments and so forth. As time went on, more and more people started to type their papers but that definitely wasn’t the norm during my middle and some of my high school years.

I guess what I’m saying is that seeing these middle school students using laptops (all of them) was pretty weird to me. Not pretty weird actually. Really weird. It made me wonder what the point of all our technological progress really is. Some of them were quite unruly which made teaching them very trying and I have to wonder if all those damn computers had anything to do with how poorly behaved some of them were. Of course, kids have been ill-behaved since the dawn of time but still, it’s worth considering I think.

I also don’t think they will ever appreciate what it was like to connect to the internet for the first time using an old-school dial-up modem. Nowadays, the internet is just… there. It’s totally taken for granted. Not like when I was young when there was kind of a long drawn out process by which you gained access to it with a lot of funny noises and little colored lights on this tiny box that you had to plug into a regular old telephone.

Some of the kids I’ve been teaching have been real pains and others have been very sweet. They run the gamut as everything in this world does I suppose. So far, I’ve taught for the first time at two different middle schools and 1 elementary school. I was a general substitute at 1 middle school and a “library/media studies” sub at the elementary and the other middle school. I hope my experience as a substitute improves fast to tell you the truth. I’m having a bit of a rough time.