Those Were The Days

Rating: NSS
I’m not close to retirement age yet, but I still find myself bugging my students with “back-in-the-day” reminisces. Of course, they remind me of my age sometime. Just try singing “California Girls” to a bunch of 5th and 6th graders. A plethora of blank looks (and not because of my singing, mind you).
The other day Radio Heartland’s blog “Trial Balloon” had a post on TV and its humble beginnings. I don’t remember when television was new, but I vaguely remember getting a color set. I remember having 5 channels from which to choose—ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and one independent. Most of the time the independent station and ABC came in clearest. The other three, not so much.
This got me reminiscing some more about the time I was in elementary school. Lutheran Schools have and have not changed a whole lot over the past 20(!) years. The school I went to is now down to about 5% of the student population it was in my day. Still, the education was good, and my teachers taught me much more about the Lutheran faith than I realized they were.
Technology has changed, but the struggle for Lutheran schools to keep up hasn’t changed. Our school had purchased two computers—Apple 2Es—and put them on carts so that they could be rolled around to classrooms. We could use them during free time. Our favorite game was “Oregon Trail.” The point of the game was to get from Independence, MO, to Oregon without dying or starving. There were no graphics; a player actually had to read the screen to figure out their progress. To hunt, one had to type the word given. It’s amazing how quickly I learned to type “blam.” Ah, the good old days.I’m not close to retirement age yet, but I still find myself bugging my students with “back-in-the-day” reminisces. Of course, they remind me of my age sometime. Just try singing “California Girls” to a bunch of 5th and 6th graders. A plethora of blank looks (and not because of my singing, mind you).
The other day Radio Heartland’s blog “Trial Balloon” had a post on TV and its humble beginnings. I don’t remember when television was new, but I vaguely remember getting a color set. I remember having 5 channels from which to choose—ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and one independent. Most of the time the independent station and ABC came in clearest. The other three, not so much.
This got me reminiscing some more about the time I was in elementary school. Lutheran Schools have and have not changed a whole lot over the past 20(!) years. The school I went to is now down to about 5% of the student population it was in my day. Still, the education was good, and my teachers taught me much more about the Lutheran faith than I realized they were.
Technology has changed, but the struggle for Lutheran schools to keep up hasn’t changed. Our school had purchased two computers—Apple 2Es—and put them on carts so that they could be rolled around to classrooms. We could use them during free time. Our favorite game was “Oregon Trail.” The point of the game was to get from Independence, MO, to Oregon without dying or starving. There were no graphics; a player actually had to read the screen to figure out their progress. To hunt, one had to type the word given. It’s amazing how quickly I learned to type “blam.” Ah, the good old days.