Look, it had knobs!

I was trying to remember when I got my first computer. It was late by a lot of standards. Schools were already requiring kids to do any type of report on a computer which made me angry because we didn’t have one. I couldn’t afford it so my kids were going to the library to do what a good deal of the other kids were doing at home.

My daughter and I were talking the other day about something we saw on TV about cheating, and teachers using websites to verify whether their students work is original or not. I think the one they mentioned was checkitout.com but I haven’t visited it so I’m not sure.

During the discussion I was expressing how I used to copy things out of encyclopedias when I was a kid. I remember doing a report on Finland and talking about gross national product and land mass and all kinds of fun things. But I copied it by hand onto lined notebook paper. We were graded on neatness and spelling and we sure as heck didn’t have spell-check.

So is that the new “when I was a kid I walked a mile to school, barefoot, in the snow…”? I can tell my kids “yeah, when I was your age, we only had 4 TV channels and maybe 3 more if the antenna could pick up the VHS stations.” And “when I was a kid we had to watch TV shows right when they were on, there was no way to record them or choose when we wanted to see them.” And oh the horror – “we had to WALK over to the TV every.single.time. we wanted to change the channel.”

So yeah, I hand wrote that report on Finland. I looked up information from 3 different encyclopedias and wrote it in pen, there was no erasing. No backspacing, no mistakes. And y’know what else? I had to know how to alphabetize because that’s the way the information was arranged in encyclopedias.

We did everything the hard way so-to-speak but there was no easy way for a teacher to tell whether or not we copied our reports word for word.

We had that going for us. And that was good.