My nine-year-old daughter was typing up her first book report for school. Â She’d already written a draft on paper, and was transcribing the report to the computer.
I decided to have her do it in Microsoft Word. Â She’d written the title, and had gotten the first paragraph down when I decided she should learn how to save the document.
I pointed to the image of floppy disk and said, “Now click on the… the little blue square thing here.”
That’s when it hit me. Â She’s nine years old, and already Microsoft Word’s graphic for save is so out-of-date as to be meaningless for her. Â What was the point of explaining what the picture was of? Â We don’t have any floppy disks. Â She’ll never see one.
Who We Were Then
- David
- Lillian
- Maddie (9 years old)
- Aaron (7 years old)
7 replies on “Click on the Blue Square Thing”
Maybe you should teach her some computer history then…
Clearly I should. In my last post, I learned that my son has no concept of local storage vs. the cloud.
He is not supposed to know the difference idiot. Just cos you are a geek don’t mean all kids should be.
In fact, if you make him all geeky with your overbearing control, then he is going to blame you in high school when he don’t get laid cos geeks are not sexy 😉
Geeks are definitely sexy. I’d rather be with someone passionate about something interesting than with someone passionate about something useless and shallow.
But then again, if being geeky is what it takes to write a love letter that’s properly written, I’ll take a geek any day.
Besides, it won’t be the geeks who’ll someday look at that blue square and say “what IS that thing?” The geeks will already know what it is. The others will point at it and call a geek to tell them. Knowledge is power, baby, and power is sexy.
I used to think sharing the best of my time and talents was a good way to express love to my kids, but (thanks to poster #3) I now recognize the error of my ways. All this time I should have been working harder to make sure each of my children would be laid by at LEAST 12th grade, preferably earlier.
Oh, God, I hope it’s not too late.
I lol’d at the comments more than the article.
In anycase, I noticed most kids who have any kind of media storage device, do not know what I’m talking about when I say Hard Drive. They don’t know HOW it works, they just know it does.
Better though, the ones who DO know what a hard drive is, don’t use thier storage space for music, they use it for Data transfer. haha. Awesome.
One day you will have to explain what a book is in order to make then understand where “bookmark” comes from.