Apocalypse Now, OMG!
The end is near: we have bred a generation of children who are learning everything backwards. Today I experienced the sudden and terrifying epiphany that we are in the grip of a paradigm shift, and it all started with a smiley-face.
I have a whiteboard in my classroom, and for some reason there is nothing 12 year olds delight in more than drawing smiley-faces on my whiteboard during nutrition. But they don’t draw normal smiley-faces anymore. They draw this, only rightside up:
It took me a moment of blank staring to realize the significance of this: they don’t realize that the computer symbol is supposed to look like a smiley-face. They think a smiley-face is supposed to look like a computer symbol. I started to hyperventilate.
My next indication of impending doom was a half hour later, when trying to explain to a child that you couldn’t just put a quotation mark at the beginning of the quote. You had to put a closing one on the end too. She didn’t get it, and didn’t get it, and didn’t get it, until the boy next to her explained that it’s “like html tags”. If you put one at the beginning, you have to put one at the end.
“Oh!!”, she said in realization, and I grew dizzy remembering that, when I was learning rudimentary html, it was explained to me as being like quotation marks or parentheses.
The final blow, some time after lunch, was when one of my Russian girls, shocked at something her friend had said, uttered the letters “OMG!”
No, she didn’t say “Oh my God!” She said “Oh Em Gee!” Like she thinks that’s actually the saying. Like we have some word, owemgee, and you spell it… I fell into my chair, eyes glazed.
I am not entirely sure I’ll be able to get out of bed tomorrow. OMG. =(
