At my house, generational epochs collide like clackers.
My sensibilities were formed in the 1970s, while my two sons are products of the 21st century. It's "The Brady Bunch" vs. "Modern Family."
I'm constantly reminding myself that it's a new world, and that my Old School ideas about childhood and schooling are hopelessly dated. If I were a computer, I would definitely need a new operating system.
Still, for almost everything new there is a 20th-century antecedent. As our Old School teachers used to say, let's compare and contrast.
Mark KennedyOld School: Banning clackers at schools. Clackers, essentially two acrylic balls connected by a string, were a toy popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When you jerked the string up and down, the balls loudly banged together -- clacked, actually -- and, if you were good, you could make that happen at near light speed in a rat-a-tat-tat pattern, over and over and over. But the balls were known to shatter, sending plastic shrapnel in all directions. Not good.
New School: Banning smartphones at schools. While smartphones pose no particular safety hazard, they can be used to hurt kids by digitally weaponizing childhood gossip. Any adult who would have wanted their fifth-grade musings about classmates cast in stone, please raise your hand. (I thought not.)
Old School: Bathroom walls. One of the seedier conventions of my youth was how some twisted kids used bathroom walls to post insults and profanities. Almost everything scribbled anonymously on a bathroom wall was either crude, rude or both.
New School: Yik Yak. Forget Snapchat, the Yik Yak social media network is the smartphone app preferred on college campuses for anonymous commentary -- which can quickly go south. While the app is technologically benign, the New York Times reports that Yik Yak is being criticized by some for becoming a platform for anonymous trolling and bullying.
Old School: Notes to teachers. I remember that, when my mother wrote a note to one of my teachers, it was a solemn occasion made even more somber by the delivery method -- me. This was a "special occasion" occurrence, and the letter was typically dripping with deference.
New School: Emails to teachers. I was talking to a teacher last week who said a co-worker was considering a career change because of the caustic letters sent by parents. Parents today, it seems, are emboldened by the ability to fire off critiques to educators without ever having to meet with them person-to-person. My advice, before you send an angry letter to a teacher, let someone else read it first. Sometimes, simply not hitting "send" is the prudent path.
Old School: Report cards. In my day, report cards were formal, six-week summaries of your progress. Other than an occasional query about homework, parents usually kept a safe distance from the educational construction zone.
New School: PowerSchool. Technology today allows parents to view their children's academic progress in real time. Through a website called PowerSchool, I can track my sons' every homework assignment and test grade. Once you start participating in a child's schoolwork at this granular level, it sort of becomes your responsibility, not theirs. And there's always the risk of becoming compulsive, like a person checking a retirement account balance several times a day.
Old School: Streaking. Easily the most bizarre trend of my high school years was the occasional naked person running down a hall -- for no reason other than get attention for running naked down a hall ... or through a shopping mall ... or across a sports field. It is impossible -- underline "impossible" -- to imagine any modern-day kid doing this, which sort of proves the theory of evolution.
New School: Twerking. Streaking is to 1975 as twerking is to 2015 -- a mystifying trend that will seem even more odd as future decades roll by. I wonder how many hips will have to be replaced in 2065 because of this shocking abuse of cartilage.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.