Changes

I know my children think I'm hopelessly lost when it comes to some new technologies. OK: I don't know how to get the music in the Ipod, but I did figure out blogging all by myself. 

Listen, in my adult years, music has morphed from albums to eight tracks to cassettes to CDs. I began life with one channel on a black and white TV; now we have HDTV with thousands of channels.  Home movies went from slides and film to VHS and then DVD.  I think my generation has seen more change in technology then all the other generations put together.

For example, when I first started teaching, we still had to hand crank copies on a ditto machine. It was before there was a state max of students in the fifth grade class I taught, so I cranked off 38 copies of every paper I needed. I went home with purple hands every day. (I asked the other teachers if they remembered ditto machines. "Yes," one said with a happy sigh,"I miss the smell of the ditto fluid. It made me happy." Hmmm. Maybe she could just sniff some of that happy juice while she uses our high speed copier that copies, collates and staples 18 copies (for the new class size) in nothing flat.)

So, I must pause today and celebrate all the progress made in teaching in my last 20 years. I was issued this little miracle from the district today:
Meet my new wireless MacBook that communicates with my wireless printer. It has a built in iSight camera (I can film my kids using the computer), iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand...and many other icons I'm sure I'll be meeting soon. Brings a tear to my eye.

I remember when, so I'm very thankful for this day. 

Now if the district will just start issuing iPhones....