Generation gap moments while teaching:

1) Mentioning the [url=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln07mhUTXCY
“]Swedish Chef[/url] and having a bunch of blank faces looking back at me.

2) Talking about and playing Marvin Gay’s What’s Going On?, and having a student look at me, in all seriousness, and saying, “I thought Fred Durst sang that.”  It was all I could do to keep from throwing him out of the classroom, and far worse than none of them knowing who Billie Holliday was. (They were clueless about “Strange Fruit”)

I realized I was getting old when I saw high school music included in the classic rock section.

I also remember John Roberts on MTV—you know, when they played music.

It’s not controversial.  The Chiffons toured with the Beatles extensively, and so Chiffons songs were burned into the subconscious of every single one of them, from sheer force of repetition.  Harrison didn’t mean to rip off “He’s So Fine”, but he did it without a doubt.

All I know is that Paul is dead...

When they started playing songs from my college years on the Flashback Lunch on 101X, I had a moment.

Me looking up from a newspaper: “Good Lord - did you know Tiffany is going to pose nude for Playboy?”

Younger friend: “Who’s Tiffany?”

I was actually talking to someone recently and said, “When did middle age sneak up on me?”

I have met more than one young person who has trouble telling time on a clock with hands.

A couple of years ago I was substitute teaching a high school p.e. class. They were doing aerobics routines to dance music.  One of them said “put on that one old song,” which turned out to be both inappropriate and hilarious to think of as an oldie: Baby Got Back.

I just recently graduated from college with a degree in engineering.  More than one of my professors thought it was hilarious that none of us knew what a slide rule is.  Apparently, it’s something that was used to figure out sines and cosines before scientific calculators were common.

At my previous internships, I usually knew more about basic computer stuff than my boss or others.  Generally, the youngest person around was the first person to go to for help with computer issues.  I even had a boss who was amazed that I connected my computer to the network printer without asking the IT department for help.

I was 15, I think, when “Baby Got Back” came out, so yeah, that’s now an oldie.  I remember when I was a little kid and my parents lamented that songs they grew up with were considered oldies, and I was like, “But they ARE old songs.”  Now, I realize that my parents—-who were my age then—-weren’t so crazy after all.

Heh, dogcat, the beauty of the internet is you never have to look stupid.  Google rules.

When I was a kid, it was kind of weird but compelling to listen to Hendrix, knowing he was dead, and The Doors, knowing Morrison was dead, and Janis, and Duane Allman, and Skynyrd (massive plane crash), Stones from before Brian Jones died (“Death by misadventure”), The Who (Keith Moon), Led Zeppelin (John Bonham), etc.  The tragedy mixed with the wild times and wild music made for a heady brew.

I still remember hearing about Stevie Ray Vaughn’s death, and by 1990, it wasn’t so damn cool.  In fact it hurt.

Since then, many more of my rock heroes have died, but usually from age and disease, and not Sex Drugs and Rock ‘N Roll.  When it is The Rock Star Life that kills them, it’s kind of stupid, like John Entwhistle (still using cocaine when you’re 57 is pathetic, not heroic), or Jerry Garcia (dying in rehab?)... 

Getting old is kind of a bitch…

I feel old whenever I reference Wile E. Coyote (Suuuuuuuuuuuuper Genius) and get a blank stare.  Sigh.  The classics are getting replaced by Sponge Bob and Pokemon.

“Apparently, it’s something that was used to figure out sines and cosines before scientific calculators were common.”

...actually, that would be logarithms, and it was basically used as a shortcut to divide and multiply large numbers fairly quickly long before portable calculators were even dreamed of.  And I only know this because my dad had one.

But then again, I’m old enough to have used programs on mainframe computers that were stored on, and read from, punched cards…

i’m 30, one of my coworkers is 19. today we were somehow all talking about milli vanilli at work. he at some point said ‘oh didn’t they pull an ashlee simpson?’ another 30-something coworker responded: ‘i think ashlee simpson pulled a milli vanilli.’

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I was 11 when Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was released. I’ve always considered it a relatively recent, modern movie that basically everyone my age or younger has watched at least once, and certainly no where near old enough to be considered a “classic”. After all, “classic” refers to *really* old movies, like The Sound of Music—a movie made long enough before I was made that as far as my perception is concerned, it has basically existed forever. When I was 11, a movie like “The Sound of Music” was inconceivably old.

So at some point last year, while thinking about John Hughes movies, it suddenly hit me that FBDO was 22 years old! In other words, old enough that if it were a person, it could have spent an entire year happily—and legally—drinking alcohol and gambling.

And, at 22 years old, it’s a now a year older than The Sound of Music was when Ferris took his day off. That means there’s some 11 year-old kid who considers “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” to be an inconceivably old movie.

My first one was when I was about 23 or 24, advising for the YMCA Youth in Government program, talking with one of the students there, who was, like, 15 or 16 at the time.

“What was it like growing up during the Cold War?” she asked me.

Until that point, I’d never considered that anyone hadn’t.

No, I know who Fran Lebowitz is.  I may not seem like it on the internets, but I read a lot and have since I could read.  I’m an official bookworm, much to the consternation of anyone who has to share living space with me and my piles and piles and piles of books.  But a hypothetical someone who doesn’t know could google her name.

This is how far behind the times Alpine was—-I knew people who used CB radio.  In the 90s.

My youngest daughter is a senior in high school.

She’s taking an elective course called “the Sixties”.

It’s given by the History Department.

....dammit, I was there, man! ....as best I can remember, anyway.

The classics are getting replaced by Sponge Bob and Pokemon.

I’m going to dissent a bit from the prevailing sentiment. Spongebob has been around for ten years, and is now a classic. This complaint, if understandable from a nostalgia viewpoint, is analogous to complaining, in 1970, about those upstarts the Flintstones, or in 1979 about these longhair hippies Mystery, Inc. Even animation deserves a living canon.

Pokemon sucks, but it’s been around even longer. (Complaining about Wile E. Coyote in 1962…)

I played my son (who’s 9) an instrumental I had whipped up on GarageBand, and he said it sounded like something from a TV commercial for an amusement park. I was about to growl something along the lines of “Thanks a lot, kid” when I looked at him and realized he meant it as a sincere compliment.

Hell, I’m 23 and I got the reference.

I had some weird reverse ones like when my boss, who is 61, insisted that there was no way I could listen to Leonard Cohen because I’m too young to have heard of him. I’m 31.

I was telling my 19-year-old sister about Amanda’s video where she plays Sarah Palin having breakfast with Cobra Commander and my little sister was like, “Who’s Cobra Commander?” (cries)

Later on, I made a reference to Ghost Busters and my sister said, “What’s Ghost Busters?” (cries more)

Noticed several instances of the “generation gap” over the last several years:

1. Several instances of finding younger classmates and co-workers asking me “What’s DOS” and exhibiting cluelessness about the existence of command-line interfaces because they’ve grown up/only seen Windows 9x and later. 

2. Discussing popular music in my childhood with younger co-workers/undergrads and finding puzzled faces when I mentioned Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, Bobby McFerrin, or even the Beastie Boys and Whitney Houston. :(

3. Shock from the youngest co-workers/current US undergrads when they found I was old enough to recall a time when computers and the internet were not critical parts of one’s daily life. 

4. Finding most of the Millennials saw events such as the Collapse of the Soviet Union & Eastern Bloc and the Tienanmen Massacre as old history….events which I clearly remembered from watching/reading the news, discussing with relatives and friends, and having strong emotional reactions as a result. 

I find this especially frustrating with far more current Chinese millennials undergrads who came of age during the late 90’s/2000s when China’s economy accelerated its growth and thus, are extremely uncritically patriotic toward the CCP and quite intolerant of any criticisms toward the CCP…...behaviors which would have earned much scorn from most Chinese students who were contemporaries of Gen X and the extreme early millenials (1979-1981). 

At my previous internships, I usually knew more about basic computer stuff than my boss or others.  Generally, the youngest person around was the first person to go to for help with computer issues.  I even had a boss who was amazed that I connected my computer to the network printer without asking the IT department for help.

That’s interesting as while I’ve experienced many older baby boomers and older adults having serious problems adjusting to having to use computers at work and in their lives, the youngest person is not always the best person to solve computer issues, especially when the issue concerned cannot be solved by pointing and clicking within the Windows/Mac graphical user interface. 

I’ve seen and heard from fellow computer professional friends about how most younger adults who didn’t grow up learning the command-line interface had a less solid grasp on how the Windows/Mac OSX operating system operated and had to consult younger boomers and Gen X co-workers who grew up having to function in the command-line environment when they’ve exhausted all of their point & click options.  Some of the younger-co-workers fresh out of college also mentioned this problem has started to seriously affect their first & second year classmates taking courses for CS majors as all they knew was the Windows GUI and most never bothered to muck around with DOS or other command-line interfaces….a serious problem when the introductory and/or intermediate courses are taught with the assumption the CS students have basic proficiency/will quickly develop such proficiency in the command-line interfaces.

An intern at my office, a college senior, doesn’t know Calvin & Hobbes.

And here’s a fun thing (where “fun” = “makes me want to cry/scream”) - a friend of mine pointed out the other day that the first kids conceived to “Head Like a Hole” are in college.

Chingona—I get a lot of those too. My wife is about fifteen years older, and every so often I’ll sing along with something on the radio (that came out when I was like, four or something) and she’ll stare at me. “How do you know that?”

Uh, my mom liked the same music? <wince>

That makes me sad. I’m 24, and I know exactly what Roberts was talking about. Then again, I’m admittedly (and proudly) not exactly representative of my generation.

I was telling my 19-year-old sister about Amanda’s video where she plays Sarah Palin having breakfast with Cobra Commander and my little sister was like, “Who’s Cobra Commander?” (cries)

Later on, I made a reference to Ghost Busters and my sister said, “What’s Ghost Busters?” (cries more)

Actually, a college classmate who is a few years older than me also didn’t know who Cobra Commander was….though that was mainly because he hated the GI Joe cartoon series because it was too jingoistic/militaristic.

Though I loved the G4 spoofs of Cobra Commander running for President this past year, I figured few people were going to get it…especially considering GI Joe wasn’t universally popular among the ‘80’s kiddie set. 

Personally, I was much more of a Transformers/A-Team fan back then…..though I learned it was best to avoid mentioning it in the halls of academia lest I incur the wrath/snobbish dismissiveness from classmates and more importantly….some Profs who feel the childhood love of such “rubbish” is manifest proof of one being unworthy of entering academia’s most hallowed halls. 

So at some point last year, while thinking about John Hughes movies, it suddenly hit me that FBDO was 22 years old!

Well, and even more disturbing to me, the kids from the Breakfast Club would be turning 40 this year.

I grew up listening to my dad’s 45s and all his favorite music on the radio (what I like to call the “fatal car wrecks tunes”), and a lot of it has really stuck with me to the point where I just stopped listening to a lot of new music.  I don’t feel a generation gap so much as I feel the need to seek out people who just know what I’m talking about.  The first song I ever heard was “Blueberry Hill”, of course that all kind of went south when I picked up my mom’s obsession for the BeeGees and other light rock.

I thank the magic of DVD for helping me with the other stuff.  “Kids today” might not know about Fraggle Rock or The Muppet Show, but it doesn’t take long to get em hooked! Bork bork bork.

This may well be culturally specific (i.e. a UK thing):

A friend - same age as me, early 30’s - was working with an 18 year old, who asked what the meaning was of my friend’s t-shirt that read “Choose Life”.

Also, I may have been born in 1976, but I know that George Harrison story.  Maybe another culturally specific thing.

Sort of a meta-moment:

I grew up watching John Roberts (then known as “J.D. Roberts”) host “The New Music” on a Toronto independent television station. I still remember being nine or ten and my very-cool punk babysitter and I watching J.D.‘s coverage of Bob Marley’s funeral.

Younger guildmate of mine on Warcraft the other day didn’t know who Bob Marley was.

/faceplant

Teaching about HIV/AIDS last semester, I had one of those moments when my students didn’t know who Ryan White was; they’d never heard his name.  A couple years before that, I had one of only a couple moments when I was stunned into silence after a student asked, “You mean there hasn’t always been AIDS?”

Jesus Christ. I was born in May 1973, but mysteriously, I am somehow aware of many events that happened in the world prior to that date. I know about John Profumo and Anthony Eden. I know about Benjamin Disraeli and Pitt the Elder. I have Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Holiday, and even Robert Johnson in my record collection, and I can tell you about their lives. I can quote Robert Burns and William Shakespeare.  I can summarise Scottish history from the fucking Bronze Age to the present day, yet I am not a historian. An “old song”, to me, is one that appears prior to the 19th century (at the very latest), credited to “Anon” or “Trad”.

What the fuck is wrong with people nowadays? How can people live with such a ludicrously foreshortened view of time? WWI is recent history, not ancient history.

WWI is recent history, not ancient history.

Is it? Well, yes, in the grand scheme of things. Still, here’s a fun realization that I had when my daughter was born.

1. World War II ended in 1945.
2. I was born in 1974, 29 years later.
3. Vietnam ended in 1975.
4. My daughter was born in 2002, 27 years later.
5. For my daughter, Vietnam is roughly as distant as World War II was for me.

And of course, World War II ended 57 years before my daughter was born (almost to the day—my daughter was born on August 11), meaning that by the time she’s in her teens and interested in such things, most World War II vets will be in their 90s. Just as for me, World War I was pretty much beyond the infinite horizon (it ended in 1918, 56 years before I was born), recorded in textbooks and nowhere else—that will be World War II for her. Her children will see Vietnam much the same way.

No, World War I isn’t ancient history—not compared to the Romans, much less the 4.54 billion year history of our planet. But it is not living history. There are few living World War I vets living, and you’re unlikely to meet one. Yes, it’s recent in the grand scheme of things—but on the human scale, it’s roughly a lifetime ago. And while I can talk about the sinking of the Lusitania and the fact that the Great Flu Epidemic actually killed more people than the War and that the Treaty of Versailles set the stage for World War II, I know such things because I studied them in a textbook, not because such things were living history. They’re no more real and vital to me than the fact that the South was doomed from Gettysburg on, or that the British burned the White House during the War of 1812, or that Charlemagne’s reign was, if not the beginning of the end of the dark ages, then at least the end of the beginning.

That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t learn them, but it does mean that people can be forgiven for not catching a reference here or there, especially to something as trivial as the “My Sweet Love” lawsuit (which, yes, I knew about, and while George was my favorite Beatle, there is nothing unintentional about his stealing the melody). And while it does make me feel old to realize that there are adults who’ve never used a computer that wasn’t able to connect to the internet, that’s probably no older than my parents, whose kids never knew a world without color television, or their parents, whose kids never knew a world without television, or their parents, whose kids never knew a world without universal electrification. Doubtless, 28 years or so from now, my daughter will stop and realize that her child has never known a world without bionic arms or artificial kidneys or something similar; indeed, I hope she does.

Jeff - I dunno, maybe it’s because my main amateur historical interest is in pre-Roman Britain and pre-Unification Scotland, but in my perspective, it’s not even really history until everybody involved is dead. What you call “living history”, I call “modern studies”. (To me, the phrase “living history” refers to historical re-enactment and experimental archaeology. I know a number of re-enactors and archaeologists, and they all work mainly in the first millennium or earlier).

I guess it’s the idea that history should be measured in human lifetimes that I object to - a human lifetime is barely a tick of the clock. The idea that the people involved have to still be alive for history to be “real and vital” is precisely what I meant by “a ludicrously foreshortened view of time”.

Maybe it’s because I’m Scottish - my national identity is primarily defined in terms of events that occurred at the start of the 14th century, and the historical period starts around the 8th century. I’ve lived in houses older than the USA, and not considered it particularly remarkable.

My students in college classes are always fascinated when I explain to them that there wasn’t always an Internet. This usually comes up in the context of how to do research properly. I always expect them to want to know how we did research before the Internet, but they couldn’t care less—the question they always want to ask is “How did you hook up?” I explain to them that once you spotted somebody you thought was cute, the next step was usually to figure out which bar they hung out in. My students, to a person, find this totally hilarious because of its sheer inefficiency.

As for “Heathers,” most of my students had never heard of it either, so I took advantage of some university funding and showed the film to a large auditorium full of students—mostly women—who were born around the time the film was originally released. They all thought it was one of the funniest things they had never seen: most of them had seen “Mean Girls,” and watching Heathers made them realize how much funnier a film can be when you take it to its logical conclusion. They all begged me to show it again the next semester. But a lot of them wanted to know why all of the girls in the film were wearing giant chunks of Styrofoam underneath the shoulders of blouses. I couldn’t explain that.

Has everyone here heard of EST?

Lot of people nowadays have no idea what I’m talking about when I mention EST.

It’s still happening; I’m told they just changed their name. Probably several times.

But in the mid-80s, when I was briefly involved in a rival “human-potential cult” called Lifespring, everyone had at least heard of EST.

Some things are rightly forgettable. Except, as my friends pointed out, it’s still out there.

My theory is, anything that happened after one was born, whether you remember witnessing it or not, seems contemporary, and anything from before then, even something that is remarkably avante-garde, seems “old-fashioned”.

It’s a subjective look/feel thing. But for me, footage of hippies at Haight-Ashbury or any movie filmed after 1965 looks and feels like it could happen today or tomorrow, and anything from before 1965 seems distinctly quaint and dated.

So for me, most but not all of the Vietnam War, for instance, is in some sense still happening now. Watergate will never be old news.

That said, I am remarkably ignorant of a lot of stuff that y’all mention that actually did happen after I was born.

This whole George Harrison thing, for instance—never heard of it until now.

Guess y’all can see why a “human potential cult” had some appeal for me!

Well, I’m glad I did it—the experience, especially the part where I broke away from them after making an ass of myself, inoculated me against certain species of Stupid.

But I remain horribly unhip. At least I’m not anti-hip nowadays!

All I know is that Paul is dead…
MikeEss

LOL, Mike.  I lived through that, listening to the background of “I Am the Walrus” and interpreting the pictures on the Sgt. Peppers album….

My most recent experience was with a half dozen college seniors who had never heard of Pete Seeger until he sang at the pre-inauguration celebration with Bruce Springsteen. 

I always thought it was an urban legend that some youngster would say that Paul McCartney used to play with a group called the Beatles.  Almost as absurd was a party I attended twenty years ago when a younger lawyer said she had recently seen Mary Travers in a solo concert.  We thirty somethings said yes we always loved her music and were glad she was getting recognition as a soloist after being in the shadow of Peter and Paul for so long.  “She was in a group with someone before?”  Groan.

Cheap and easy mainstream access to color imagery. Film, four-color process printing, television, home photography. Cinematic and graphic-design arts exploded. Everything went from grayscale to living, breathing, life-imitating color. Yes, we’d had Technicolor cinema for twenty years before that, but that was what made the movies so special, so worth the price of admission. The world exploded into color in about 1965.

On the question of what’s “living memory” and what’s ancient history, consider this: There are four generational degrees of separation between a young person living today and the events of the French Revolution. A young person in 1789 who witnessed Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine could have lived to tell a young person about it in 1860. That person could have lived to recount this to someone in 1940, who in turn told a grandchild born in 1990.

It’s just not all that long ago.

Oh, and one more cranky-old-fart point: When one is confronted with a point of history with which one is unfamiliar, the proper response is to ask for clarification and elucidation. The improper response is to hem and haw and make your interlocutor feel like a goddamed idiot for having brought it up. It’s quite hilarious to me that this point is going to become blisteringly self-evident to every. Single. One. Of. You. Eventually.

This lightbulb joke provides a simple test:

Q: How many NPCs does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: How many NPCs does it take to change a lightbulb?

If you laughed, you probably grew up playing video games.

And if you didn’t laugh the first time, had to reread it and *then* laughed, it means that like me you’re old enough to remember NPC as something that precedes its videogame meaning.

My theory is, anything that happened after one was born, whether you remember witnessing it or not, seems contemporary, and anything from before then, even something that is remarkably avante-garde, seems “old-fashioned”.

I have a similar theory, though I put the point somewhere around the beginning of political awareness or real awareness of outside events. For me it’s 1988. I was in middle school. There was a presidential election on, and we had a mock election at my school. My entire life - that I could remember - had been Reagan and my parents screaming at the television and my dad coming home from work and making me turn off Little House on the Prairie so he could watch the news. But now hope was in the air. A change was possible. I couldn’t believe the country voted in another Republican - no one I knew was a Republican. I started to pay attention to stuff and read the paper. I kept a scrap book of clippings from the paper (how ancient does that make me sound?), and I watched the news with my parents.

And nothing that has happened since that point seems that long ago. That the babies born during that time are in college astounds me. That was 20 years ago? Impossible.

But Reagan getting shot? The Iranian hostage crisis? Anything to do with Carter? That’s history. It happened during my lifetime, but I was so young that I have no memory of these things and had to learn them the same way I learned about Vietnam or WWII or the Civil War.

Having had to register to comment, my copy-and-paste was incomplete. My first paragraph above was in response to Mark Foxwell’s:

But for me, footage of hippies at Haight-Ashbury or any movie filmed after 1965 looks and feels like it could happen today or tomorrow, and anything from before 1965 seems distinctly quaint and dated.

When one is confronted with a point of history with which one is unfamiliar, the proper response is to ask for clarification and elucidation.

I usually just ask straight-up “What’s that?” or “Who’s that?” This usually results in mercilous mocking of me by the wise elder person. Respect’s a two-way street.

@chingona: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

An intellectual habit well worth fighting against.

my undergrads who think World War II was televised.*  I showed my class a WWII “Private Snafu” film which included the Beethoven duh-duh-duh-duuuuuhh” which also stood for the Morse code for V, as in Victory.  I then had to explain Morse Code.  one of my students asked how widely people knew Morse Code, “did they learn about it on TV?”  oye.

In my Public History class, in a section on how memory is formed I had the class compare generational experiences.  How many grew up using a typewriter and not a computer (just me), how many grew up with a dial telephone, and one that had a cord (just me, and a 35-year old student).  how many grew up with 3-4 TV channels (just me), how many grew up with cell-phones (just the students), etc., etc.  Then we talked about how such basic day-to-day experiences created assumptions of what was “normal” and how that would affected such things as oral history….  a great discussion even though I felt OLD afterwards….

On the plus side, I did have one student chime in with “mass hysteria!” when I described used the phrase “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… “

* yes, I know, there were TV broadcasts in the 30s, but they were limited and it was not a form mass media until after the war.

Respect’s a two-way street.

Completely agreed. But the reaction by Alina Cho and Erica Hill toward John Roberts, you must admit, was thoroughly disrespectful.

and no, I don’t make fun of them.  That would be unprofessional, unkind, and unfair.  However, I have teased a student (with whom I have a good relationship) wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt for wearing a t-shirt for bands from when I was young.  You don’t catch me wearing shirts for Benny Goodman concerts!

how many grew up with a dial telephone

I think the first hint that this was going to become a problem was when I was in an antiques store with my then 9- and 7-year-old kids. They were utterly mystified by a Princess dial phone. Ah, yes, and now I remember playing shops with my 3-year-old daughter. When it came time to pay, she swiped her credit card. Wow. History happens fast.

I think you misunderstand me, Neddie Jingo. I said things that happened before 1988 seem like history, while those that happened after seem recent. I didn’t say things that happened before 1988 don’t matter or aren’t worth knowing. “History” isn’t a pejorative, at least not for me.

You don’t catch me wearing shirts for Benny Goodman concerts!

Interesting point. When did people start thinking that it was OK to wear advertising as everyday apparel? In 1974, a Pink Floyd t-shirt was a way of identifying oneself as an outsider, probably a pothead. Now the point has become so meta that folks happily wear advertising for products they couldn’t identify in a police lineup. It makes my head hurt.

Chingona, my point was that we all do that. That’s how history becomes a pejorative for people who don’t bother to try to understand that what came before them was just as real to those living it as it is today. I’m not attacking you, I’m just trying to fight the frighteningly common perception that if I didn’t live through it, it didn’t happen. Dunc, upthread, has his finger directly on it: “WWI is recent history, not ancient history.”

As for Bugs Bunny et al., I don’t think that they’re going anywhere.  My 11 year old zooms right to those DVDs, and all her friends know them, too.

As for the Old Dude moment…
Late 90s, in our law firm.  We had a HS student in to do a co-op placement.  We gave him a pile of envelopes and an address list, and told him to type up the envelopes.  (All the ‘puters and printers were working that day and we needed the extra resource.)  He’d never seen a typewriter before.  Oh, he’d heard of them, the way that people have heard of Studebakers and telegraphs, but he’d never actually seen one before.

It happens all the time here at work. One christmas, my assistant (20 years younger) said she had to go home & do some wrapping. I made what I thought to be a VERY humorous remark -  “Like Christmas Rapping by Kurtis Blow?” To which I heard nothing but crickets chirping. So I immediately called up a friend from high school and relayed the joke to her to her great amusement.

Oh, Jesus - I’ve just realised I bear the same relationship to someone who fought in WWII as do some young women I regularly tease, the daughters of a friend of mine.  No wonder they just roll their eyes and humour me.

My son watched Bugs Bunny on YouTube.  I think it’s associated with Thomas the Tank Engine in his head, as something watched on the computer.

I like to think about how technology colors (pun intended) our perception of what reality was when images were captured.  Perhaps 1965 seems vibrant and real because of Kodachrome?  Will the 90’s seem blocky and grainy?  Will the 80’s seem all snowy and zig-zaggy?

Don’t feel old. I was born in 1984 & I get the reference. This people are just pop culture retards.

George Michael in that Wham video

which one

I went to see George Michael in concert this summer (AWESOME!).  When I got back to me seat after buying a beer, I said to the women next to me, “We’ve become the people at the Peter, Paul and Mary concerts on PBS.”

“How many of you out there have had a real “generation gap” experience that you’d like to share?”

For me, it’s texting shortcuts.  It makes me irritable to see “ur l8” or “ne1” or “wen.”  I start to mutter to myself and a noticeable limp develops and then I start rambling about kids and my lawn and respect.

The only genuine “generation gap” / “culture shock” I’ve had was when I moved in my neighborhood, which has a large Lebanese and Middle Eastern population, and kids here all call me ‘Sir’. I’m 29, dang it. ‘Sir’ is my father…

Us French Canadians never call anyone ‘sir’. It’s not in our culture. In my case, on top of it not being part of my upbringing, I actively hate the term because I’m a far leftie. I prefer ‘comrade’, or any other term that demonstrates a belief in social equality with my interlocutor, rather than a term of deference and submission (‘respect’, in mainstream-talk) like ‘sir’.

“A friend - same age as me, early 30’s - was working with an 18 year old, who asked what the meaning was of my friend’s t-shirt that read “Choose Life”.”

“There seems to be a wide array of choices: George Michael in that Wham video, Trainspotting, and both assumedly referencing The National Suicide Prevention Action Plan. Over here in the states it’s used almost exclusively by anti-choicers. “

My generational/cultural reference was to Trainspotting.  I don’t know the George Michael reference - a meta-generational difference perhaps?

My generational/cultural reference was to Trainspotting.  I don’t know the George Michael reference - a meta-generational difference perhaps?

Just a gap.  We remember George Michael as a clean-cut upright singer, the sort of wholesome role model our parents could point at and say “why don’t you listen to him instead of that other rubbish?!?”.  The Choose Life shirt was part of that image - see this clip.

Funny how that worked out…

“... I actively hate the term because I’m a far leftie. I prefer ‘comrade’, or any other term that demonstrates a belief in social equality with my interlocutor, rather than a term of deference and submission (’respect’, in mainstream-talk) like ‘sir’. “

BlackBloc:  (Hey, fellow Canadian here.)  I’m not on the same page with you on that one.  My own views are closer to the old man in “for whom the bell tolls” for whom socialism meant that everyone gets to be called “Don”.

That said, I do use the phrase “comrade”.  It must be something in the water.

My I’m getting old moment came last week.  I teach a physics class at the local U in the evenings and I was talking about electric fields.  I made a joke, admittedly bad, about the electric field lines being like the Ghostbusters proton packs, because you ‘can’t cross the streams’.  And only one other person in the room was old enough to get it.  Everyone else, mostly traditional students and so in their late teens/early 20s, looked at me like I had grown another head and had no idea what I was talking about.  And I’m only 32, so it isn’t like I’m ancient or anything.

Another one:  the husband got himself an Apple TV last week and was messing around on YouTube with the kids.  He came across a video of Darth Vader doing the Thriller zombie dance and the kids didn’t get why we were both cracking up.  I had to actually show the video to Thriller to my very own children so that they would get the joke.

When I started working in my office 2 years ago, I was 25. I found that i had more cultural references in common with my bosses who were in their early 30s than the kid who helped us move equipment around and was 23. That was weird.

Also, in High School, when I was a senior some friends an I were talking about John Hughes movies. Most of our friends who were juniors didn’t know the movies and they were one year younger. So I don’t always get how this stuff works. I saw those movies on TV on the weekends. They grew up in the same area. I just never could see how they had never seen stuff that was on TV all the time before there were 500 channels. Maybe 60 channels, cause we had cable but it hadn’t blown up to digital levels yet. I don’t know.

That made me feel old and out of place.

I’m 23 and I totally know what he’s talking about!

But I am a big Beatles fan…..

Oh yeah, I remembered another one. I don’t remember whether Atrios pointed it out himself or linked to someone who did, but anyway: Finding out that more years have passed since Appetite for Destruction came out than passed between Sgt. Pepper and Appetite for Destruction.

then I start rambling about kids and my lawn and respect.

I have been having such moments when I go to many university libraries and find them to be far more noisy than when I was in college because of the ubiquitousness of the cellphone.  It was a shock going from recalling a period when merely speaking in a loud whisper in the college/university library was enough to get you tossed out/barred from the library to the present where current undergrad and even some younger grad students seem to feel entitled to gab on the cell in the library as if they were at a public bus stop…...and woe to any librarian or security guard who orders them to take the cell conversations outside…..

>>That said, I do use the phrase “comrade”.  It must be something in the water.

Of course, using ‘comrade’ outside of my usual circles tends to lead to some stares, and sometimes an horrified reaction from some people in their 50s or above (the kids tend to find it quaint, like I talk like a stereotypical movie Russian).

When I’m in activist circles and really want to ham it up in self-deprecation, I use ‘fellow worker(s)’. Cracks us up every time.

I started to have geezer moments in the ‘80s, but then I was in my 30s and worked at a college with nontraditional students.

In I think 2000, I amused myself by declaring that in x years, the Sex Pistols would be eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  This was not well received.

Most of my jokes are dependent on pop culture references of the last 50 years, which means I am increasingly unfunny.  Maybe I can get a job annotating early Stephen King…

I’m born in 1971, so I came of age in the 1980s during Reagan’s presidency. The Cold War, and the fear of nuclear annihilation, was a looming shadow over my adolescence (one of my best creative writing assignments was a dialog among 4 high school kids in a fallout shelter after a nuclear war debating if it was safe to go out). The biggest single news event during high school was the Challenger disaster (which was 22 years ago today), which has been thrown into shade by stuff like the Okla. city bombing and 9/11, events of greater enormity.

It’s impossible to convey to anyone who was born after 1976 or so how absolutely astonishing the political period from 1989-1991 was, with the old world order being overthrown completely; starting with one European country after another shaking off Communism, Mandela released from prison after 27 years, then the Soviet Union collapsing. If you’d told me, starting my senior year in high school in the fall of 1987, that in two years all of Eastern Europe would no longer be Communist, and two years after that the Soviet Union would be GONE, I would have thought you insane.

Technology-wise, I certainly remember DOS, and the Apple II, and my first exposure to the Internet was typing UNIX commands into a VAX terminal in the basement of the science building at my alma mater in 1991. I wrote all my papers in college using WordPerfect 5.1 on an IBM PC clone, and I didn’t own a computer myself until 1994, when I bought a Mac Performa 636.

I think my college experience (graduating in 1992) was more similar to someone 15-20 years older than I, than a current college student’s college experience would be to my own. The Internet, cell phones, and iPods have changed college life completely.

The world exploded into color in about 1965.

Yes, Neddie, I thought of that. I was born in the middle of a decade or so of transition from black-and-white TV to color; by the time I was paying attention to the tube, everything contemporary was in color and only “old” stuff was not.

(However, my first <u>political</u> memory was watching Robert Kennedy’s funeral, on my grandmother’s TV, and IIRC it was a BW set.)

Oh, and one more cranky-old-fart point: When one is confronted with a point of history with which one is unfamiliar, the proper response is to ask for clarification and elucidation. The improper response is to hem and haw and make your interlocutor feel like a goddamed idiot for having brought it up. It’s quite hilarious to me that this point is going to become blisteringly self-evident to every. Single. One. Of. You. Eventually.
Neddie Jingo on 01/28 at 06:43 AM

Well, in history classes, when I hadn’t done all of the assigned reading, I tended to just put my hand up and have opinions anyway. I wasn’t consciously trying to cynically fake it, but I certainly did pick up stuff in class that I should have read and thought about first.

Thus my first response is to more or less fake knowing what the hell people are talking about, and thus learn as I go along, and lately I’ve learned to more or less fall silent when I am completely out of my depth.

It would be best if people could only be honest and not get mocked for ignorance.

It’s impossible to convey to anyone who was born after 1976 or so how absolutely astonishing the political period from 1989-1991 was, with the old world order being overthrown completely; starting with one European country after another shaking off Communism, Mandela released from prison after 27 years, then the Soviet Union collapsing. If you’d told me, starting my senior year in high school in the fall of 1987, that in two years all of Eastern Europe would no longer be Communist, and two years after that the Soviet Union would be GONE, I would have thought you insane.

A while back I worked with a guy who might have been about your age (just a little older than me, but older by just the right amount that he came of age, as you say, in a different world than I did), who majored in Russian and spent a year studying in what was then the Soviet Union, with every intention of trying to get into the CIA. He told me his senior year of college he watched the Berlin Wall come down on TV, and the thought that just kept running through his head was: “I’ve wasted my entire life.”

Um, Norsecats, I think you’re me.

Weird, I am 39 now, and had no fear of the Soviet Union. I was sure that their economy was weak, and that they were sane enough never to put MAD into actual action. When I was 10, which would have been in 1979, I wrote a short story for class about an American agent having to foil a plot by a terrorist to fire a Soviet missile to provoke WWIII.
But I read some pretty odd things growing up, including Comrade Don Camillo, a political novel by an Italian satirist where his priest character blackmails his friend the communist mayor into taking him on a tour of Russia.

I find the generation gap stuff amusing; I have friends who are more than a decade younger or older than me, so the bafflement comes up all the time.

The only generational thing I actually think matters to me is that I intend to go back to college soon. And I don’t know if the old-style SAT score will be acceptable, or if I will have to take the new tests.

Well, in history classes, when I hadn’t done all of the assigned reading, I tended to just put my hand up and have opinions anyway. I wasn’t consciously trying to cynically fake it, but I certainly did pick up stuff in class that I should have read and thought about first.

Thus my first response is to more or less fake knowing what the hell people are talking about, and thus learn as I go along, and lately I’ve learned to more or less fall silent when I am completely out of my depth.

It would be best if people could only be honest and not get mocked for ignorance.

This is understandable, especially in the middle to upper-level undergrad history classes where the reading loads per class can easily approach 800-1000 pages/week.  Factor in taking 3-4 other courses with most having comparable workloads and you’d either have to be either extremely dedicated or a superfast reader to do all of the assigned readings.  Some of the Profs who assign the reading do not expect their students to do all of the reading….and would actually be shocked if their students did finish considering the workload they have for other classes along with extracurricular and life commitments. 

In the vast majority of cases, as long as you done most of the readings and understand them, you’ll usually be well ahead of the game. 

As for your wish on how people react to ignorance, I’d agree with it for the most part…..unless the classmate/student exhibited signs s(he) didn’t bother to do ANY of the reading period.  Then, it is not really the mocking of ignorance so much as the valid criticism of a student who willingly slacked off on his/readings to the point s(he) couldn’t participate coherently in the class discussions on them. 

@exholt: It’s going to get worse.  Where I work, they’re planning on closing all the campus libraries but one, sending most of the books to an off-campus storage site, and converting the remaining library building to have cafes, lots of group study areas, places for people to watch movies, and so on.  In my day, we called places like that the student center….

Sad part is the university whose library I frequent has a gleaming newly built student center which does get plenty of use.  Unfortunately, for some odd reason the students feel entitled to chatter loudly on the cells in the library anyway….and get quite irate when librarians or security guards tell them to take it outside. 

The only generational thing I actually think matters to me is that I intend to go back to college soon. And I don’t know if the old-style SAT score will be acceptable, or if I will have to take the new tests.

Samantha,

Unless there is an exception for non-traditional students which I’m not aware, you’re going to have to retake your SATs.  Back when I took them in the early 90’s, they were usually regarded as valid for 3-5 years by most higher-ed institutions.  Afterwards, ETS will put a notation saying those scores may not reflect the applicant’s current abilities or some other rubbish. 

From what I gathered from the recent GRE exams, ETS will only keep your scores on file for around 5 years before expunging them.  After that period has lapsed, one will have to retake them again. 

You have my sympathies as I hated taking such tests myself….but higher ed institutions seem to love those tests….and ETS loves capitalizing on that love.

Samantha,

Also, to worsen the generation gap aspect, you will now have to take the test on a computer in a testing center instead of the old paper & #2 pencil test unless you can show documentation that your disability prevents you from taking the SATs on a computer. 

Check with the institutions you are looking to attend to see if they are willing to waive the SAT requirement and/or how much emphasis they place on SAT scores for non-traditional students. 

Hopefully, you can save yourself the trouble and expense of taking that test. 

Good luck on the application process….and hopefully the waiving of taking the SATs.