It's Not What You Know It's When You Know

I may have mentioned this before, but I am surrounded by people who do not understand me. The previous statement was not made due to angst ridden self-absorption like a morose teenager. I truly mean they do not understand me.
My place of work houses over 500 people who were born fifteen years after I graduated from high school. Age has caught up to me in many ways. The waist measurement will never be 32 inches again. My hair is getting lighter in color and in weight. My knee twinges when the barometric pressure fluctuates. But, the times I feel the oldest are when I make references to things I think everybody will understand and they look at me like I just spoke in the language of the aboriginal inhabitants of Outer Mongolia.
Years ago I was teaching a sixth grade class. A kid in the back row was tapping his pencil on his desk, incessantly. I was able to ignore it for a while, but it finally got to me. Instead of racing to his desk taking the pencil from his hand and breaking it into tiny pieces, which is what I wanted to do, I stayed professional. I calmly put my hand on his shoulder and asked him to stop doing his Ringo Starr impression. I received that speaking Mongolian stare. Neither he nor anyone else in the class knew who Ringo Starr was so my statement made as much sense as asking him to carefully insert a lobster into each nostril.
I recently learned there is a phrase other than the over used “generation gap” to point out the different worlds in which different age groups live. It is called a “mindset”. This makes sense because the mindset people have is dictated by the world they know. There is a website published by Beloit College in Wisconsin which makes lists of things pertaining to students who would be graduating in the years 2002 to 2012. It makes for interesting reading.
Technology is the starkest difference between the generations. This is discussed at the website, but I am reminded of another instance I came across as a teacher. This was many years ago. We were doing a fire safety lesson with fourth graders and in order to make it more physical we had the students do actions for the different things one should do in case of a fire. They would actually stop, drop and roll. They would crawl a short distance to show them how they should move in a smoky house. Then we had them run a short distance (as in getting to a neighbor’s house). The last thing was to pretend to call 9-1-1.
This was downright funny. The kids would be in a lather as they did all the physical activities and then they would come sprinting up to the phone we had sitting on a chair for them to make their emergency phone call. They would grasp the receiver and their pointer finger would be poised over the dial. The dial?! They had no idea how to “dial” a phone. They had only seen buttons. There was that Mongolian look again.
Stop and think about the most memorable things in your lifetime, the cultural things, not just your first date with that hot girl from algebra class. Kids going into college this past fall do not have the same collective unconscious we had. They can’t discuss where they were when Kennedy was shot, when Reagan was shot, or even when J.R. was shot. For them the argument has always been Mac versus PC, not Ford versus Chevy. A text is a group of letters on a tiny screen not the book you have to read for history class. These people have no idea why whenever there is a controversy in the world we tack on the suffix “-gate”.
Personally, I look to one very particular aspect of my life that my children will not experience. It is not earth-shattering, deeply philosophical or something that will be discussed by historians in the 22nd century, but I think it is representative of how the world has changed. They do not get to watch Johnny Carson each night.
The persona of Carson showed kindness, intelligence and humor. These traits are not played up nearly enough in the mass media of today. There is more interest in Simon Cowell, political knife fights (still only figurative and verbal, but it could turn literal very easily), and jokes about human effluvia. The mindset has changed.