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.