Thursday, May 23, 2013

I've Finally Reached That Age When...

I can't believe it's here:  the end of my 19th year in education.  Well, the end of my 37th year in education, if you count the years I spent as a student.

I remember when I was a young yearbook adviser, and we marked glossy photographs with red wax pencils to crop the photo we needed for whatever page we were building.  Using rulers, ballpoint pens, and 3R graphing paper, we manually built the yearbook from scratch.  Today, as I covered a class for an ill teacher, I watched a couple of yearbook staffers squeeze in page development between projects in the classroom:  there was the page layout, on the student's laptop, and she was plugging in digital photos as quickly as you could say "cheese."  Manipulating font and point size, dropping in various backgrounds, until she finally felt the page was ready for her adviser to review:  it took her about 20 minutes. 

Unbelievable.

I think back even further, when I was a high school student.  Like many schools in rural America, mine had a small lab made up of a few Apple IIe's.  I was lucky enough to be taking an independent study programming class--I remember I built a rudimentary program that kind of mimicked the lawnmower game that many of us remember from those days.  Basically, the computer operator had a "lawn" to mow, and moved the growing green stripe around that virtual lawn until it was all cut.  Their score was based on how little overlap occurred while mowing.

Kind of lame, really, when I stand behind our VREP (Virtual Reality Education Pathways) students and watch them build and manipulate three dimensional models much like those we see in modern video games and in films like 'Avatar.'

In ten years, as retirement starts to become visible on the distant horizon, I wonder what will seem crude and primitive to me, then?

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