Eli: Sure! If you can get him to come to you.
Student 1: So do you live here on campus?
Eli: No. But thank you for thinking I'm young enough to be able to!
Student 1: Obviously I didn't think you were a student. I thought maybe you were a groundskeeper or something.
Eli: Like Hagrid?
Student 2: Anyway, we don't have age restrictions here. This is an inclusive safe space.
Eli: Sounds like my dating life!
Student 1 & 2: [blank stares]
Eli: So . . . are you two freshmen?
Student 1 & 2: [with scrunched-up faces like I had offended them greatly]
Student 2: We don't say that word here.
Eli: Did I swear again? I've gotten into a very bad habit of calling people ass--
Student 1: You said the F word.
Eli: I did? I could have sworn--
Student 2: [whispers] freshmen.
Eli: . . . is that . . . a swear now?
Student 1: It's not a very inclusive term.
Student 2: News flash: women can go to college now too!
[both look at each other like they just schooled an idiot]
Eli: So what do you say instead of fr . . . uh . . . the F word?
Student 1: We say "first year."
Student 2: Except I don't like those labels because they put people into boxes and make it harder for others to respect them.
Student 1: Right. Because when someone is called a first year others might be willing to disregard what they say just because they haven't been in school for very long.
Eli: Well, can't all the first years just sort of stick together in the dorms?
Student 2: Yeah, we don't say "dorms." They're called "resident halls."
Student 1: And it's an inclusive community living space.
Student 2: Super inclusive.
Eli: I guess things have changed. Back in my day freshmen lived in the dorms and nobody cared what they said or thought because they were still children and they hadn't poured their blood, sweat, and tears into at least a decade of grunt work in order to begin to earn the smallest dot of respect and competence.
[blank stares]
Student 1: You said the F word again.
These people are going to starve to death in the real world, right?
Also, as I started to walk away I realized that it has somehow been FIFTEEN years since I was starting my freshman year of college. That number looks and sounds so wrong that I swear to you I actually pulled out a calculator to check it because I haven't done math in, well, almost FIFTEEN years!
A few months ago I met the son of a colleague of mine who told me he was about to be a freshman at the high school I attended. I told him this, prompting him to ask me what year I graduated to which he responded, "cool. That's the year I was born."
COOL? NOT COOL, Brad.
The point is, when did you people get so old?
I remember filling out physical papers and mailing them into the school to register for classes. I remember talking to my parents sparingly because long-distance calls were expensive.
Usually I don't think I entered adulthood very long ago, but then I think about all the ways the world has changed and it makes me feel like, well, not a first year.
Please tell me something about what the world was like back when you were graduating high school or starting college, even if it wasn't very long ago. How have things changed?
And while you're thinking about it, here's a picture of what Duncan looked like during the entire conversation above.
~It Just Gets Stranger
My husband and I drove across the country for an internship one semester, and we printed out hard copies of mapquest directions to get there. And then when we made a wrong turn somewhere in Ohio, we had to stop and buy an atlas to get us the rest of the way. My kids now don't even know what an atlas is!
ReplyDeleteI had an email address from the school my freshman year at college. But no one else I knew that weren't college students had an email address. So I could email other students but not my family.
ReplyDeleteWe had to type all our papers on TYPEWRITERS, and the one I had to use was an older model that didn't allow you to just backspace to correct an error. So, if you made a mistake, and couldn't (manually) erase it cleanly, you had to re-type the whole page. Just now, as I was thinking about typing the last few lines of a given page, I found myself holding my breath again, as I used to do then. WHEW!
ReplyDeleteI've heard my dad several times talk about a class he had in college in the 70s in which the professor said he wouldn't accept any turned-in homework that had a single mistake or a trace of white-out on it. I have no idea how people with anxiety issues did college back then. Also, I seriously backspace once for every four characters I type.
DeleteTyping papers for other students is how I could afford to eat at college. The typing lab had typewriters with memory and a little screen so you could see if you had made an error and correct it before it printed . . . . man I'm glad we have computers!
DeleteThe Internet was just getting started when I graduated HS :) and cell phones were too expensive for the regular folk.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a freshman, long-distance calling was still expensive. The last thing my parents said before leaving me there (in tears, I might add!) was "you don't need to be calling us all the time, it's expensive!" A couple of weeks later someone else from my hometown told me that their Mom said I should call my Mom as she hadn't heard from me.
ReplyDeleteLiving here in Boilermaker Land I get to spend quite a bit of time with college students and there's a new term "forever freshman." It's used to refer to someone who doesn't grow up.
Boilermaker land?! I hope that means Purdue. Boiler up! Hate to be a cliche, but I really had some of the best years on that campus!
DeleteI graduated high school 10 years ago. When I started college in 2007, I was the first class of first years at my university. We still had landlines in the dorms (which I guess were officially residence halls but we all still called them dorms), but nobody used the landlines because most of us had cellphones by then and the landline numbers had been given out to so many local businesses over the years that they always rang with junk calls and never someone actually looking for the current residents.
ReplyDeleteEveryone OWNED a laptop in college, but computer labs were still prominent on campus and almost nobody wanted to lug their bigass computer to class so we still took notes by hand.
I think the biggest deal in 2007 was the change from MySpace to Facebook that was occurring. There was a serious debate between people over which site was better, and some people just did not want to learn a new platform, ESPECIALLY if they couldn't customize it!
I should add that the idea of being a "first year" in 2007 was amusing to us; my friend drew a comic for the school paper comparing our university to Hogwarts. Nobody was worried about being PC or inclusive at the time, we just thought about Harry Potter references. The seventh book had just come out earlier that year. We even joked that RAs were Prefects.
DeleteMy son just started college. At his school, they call first years freshmen, and while they officially are called residence halls, the kids call them dorms.
ReplyDeleteWhen I graduated high school, Bryan Adams' "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman" was #1 on the Billboard charts, and Pocahontas and Batman Forever (the one with Val Kilmer and Jim Carrey) had just come out in theaters.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm old enough to have produced a person who is old enough to have started college. You're a youngster by comparison.
Do you know why they are not supposed to be called dorms? I never did get an explanation for that. I was too busy being shamed.
DeleteI just graduated from college and while I was there I worked for my schools department of Campus Living and Learning. We in CLL weren't allowed to call our buildings dorms because this supposedly implied that as a dormitory, all you could do there is sleep but as a residence hall, you could do other things like live and make friends and build community.
DeleteI just graduated from college and while I was there I worked for my schools department of Campus Living and Learning. In CLL we weren't allowed to refer to our buildings as dorms because it supposedly implied that as a dormitory, all you could do there is sleep but as a residence hall, you could also continue the learning process, build relationships, and you know, be awake.
DeleteThe year I graduated from high school...you were in diapers. Whippersnapper. I'm almost old enough to be your mother, had I been a precocious teenager, which I wasn't, and which we don't know what precocious even means.
ReplyDeleteMoonlighting was this cool new show starring some dude named Bruce Willis.
We were singing along with the soothing tones of Su-su-ssudio. With no idea what it meant. Still don't.
The Breakfast Club just came out, for cryin' out loud.
I can only imagine the conversation Skylar would have had with those "first year-ers". Millennials. Am I right? Back in my day, the ancient times, we let words just be words and didn't feel a need to protesteth so much.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, back in your day we were also burning doctors in town squares because we thought they were practicing witchcraft.
Delete"Doctors"
DeleteI like that when I click on your profile there's an It Just Gets Stranger Test site listed. Whatever happened to that goat? I really liked that goat.
DeleteHe died in the war. Won a medal though for his bravery.
DeleteI had a land line in my fre...irst year dor....midance hall. and a Nokia cell phone. And aol instant messenger was space age technology!
ReplyDeleteWay back in 1986 we had typewriters and the old fashioned card catalog!! NO cell phones, PCs or internet. By the time I finished college in 1990 everyone had a desk top PC with a dot matrix printer. BUT...we were blessed with all the fantastic 80's music to get us through so it was worth it.
ReplyDeleteI didn't get my first cell phone until my first year away from home while attending college. I often purposely left my cell phone at my apartment all day while going to classes and didn't even think twice about it. I can still remember my family getting mad because they could never get a hold of me during the day. Now if I forget my phone at home I feel like I need to turn around immediately and go and grab it! Sometimes I wish I could go back to the days of not wasting so much time on my phone.
ReplyDeleteI also started college in 2002! We had landlines in our DORM rooms and we actually used them. Most of us also had clunky Nokia cell phones too but minutes were expensive! Texting wasn't a thing yet. We had a small, heavy tv in our dorm room that we watched whatever tv was on (no dvrs!). We had laptops but I remember always keeping it plugged into the internet - maybe wifi wasn't a thing yet? We communicated via phone and AIM messaging. I remember getting excited when I would hear a door opening - someone was on AIM! Last year I went back to my college and got a peak inside my old dorm room; it had been updated with new carpet and furniture but otherwise it was mostly the same! Except there was a big tv mounted on the wall. Seemed so out of place to me!
ReplyDeleteI went to college ten years ago and I honestly sometimes don't think things have changed that much. But then I realize that none of us had smart phones. Facebook was huge by then but we had to log on exclusively on our laptops. No snap chat. No email on my phone. We got point and shoot cameras as graduation gifts and brought them everywhere in our purses so we'd have FB photos to share when we later uploaded them to our computer.
ReplyDeleteAlso I've noticed my little step sister who is a freshman also has this complex of wanting to be older and not have people think she's a baby. We all wanted that but she gets really offended by the word naive. Maybe it's a weird generational thing because they feel more grown up then we did.
Dear God, if only we could go back to the whole NO SNAPCHAT way of life!
DeleteI started college ten years ago too! Totally remember the point and shoot camera phase and attending the 7th Harry Potter book arrival at the the bookstore at midnight.
DeleteFreshman year: landlines; no one had a laptop; pre-Facebook so our only conversations were through AIM, which we had open ALL THE TIME so we could chat with our friend who was only two doors down in the dormitory; everyone owned a Dell computer.
ReplyDeleteBy the time I graduated Facebook was just started and I had gotten my first cellphone- a brick Nokia that is still hanging around somewhere in my house.
And now my almost 2 year old knows how to work my old iPhone to get to his favorite app to watch Curious George and owns his own tablet.
Facebook was just taking off when I was a FRESHMAN in college. My parents wouldn't let me have a Myspace in high school, because of safety concerns and such. So, as I sat on my ridiculously uncomfortable twin bed in my DORM with my very old laptop that would overheat after using it for an hour, I remember feeling a moment of rebellion as I signed up for Facebook. This first instance of rebellion led to a downward spiral of all-night Guitar Hero marathons, 2:00 a.m. runs to Village Inn, and class being “optional” when 8:00 a.m. finally rolled around.
ReplyDeleteI went back to college 12 years after I graduated high school. I was 6 months pregnant. We had no "word processor", so after dinner, my husband and I would pack up the kids and go back to his office, so I could use their "processor" to type my papers on while he kept the kids occupied. Floppy discs were all the rage. It's amazing how far we have come in the area of technology since then.
ReplyDeleteMy sophomore year of college - or my "second year" or whatever the f-word the kids are calling it these days - we could email each other. We thought it was the coolest thing ever. Of course, you couldn't send email anywhere back then. It was just within the school. Basically my roommates and I would send each other messages that you had to go to the library to read. It was definitely easier just to tell them in person. But the novelty of it all made it fun. And now look at us - I don't think I've spoken actual words from my mouth to any of my college roommates in years, but we catch up all the time via social media and email. What a time to be a recluse! Am I right?
ReplyDeleteWhen I was graduating high school, one of the most popular songs was "The Freshmen", by the Verve Pipe. I guess it would be impossible to play on the radio now since it would be breaking many FCC laws what with all of its F words :). We were excited to finally update our dot matrix printer at home. And I actually knew all of my friends' phone numbers because I had to dial them on a land line phone. If I didn't know a phone number I had to look it up in a phone book. It was a simpler time.
ReplyDeleteI was a freshman in 1983. Cell phones were not invented yet. By the time I graduated, we started seeing some of the old "brick" style cell phones. I was lucky to have some limited computer skills and typed my term papers on a template based word processor on an Apple IIe. Windows based operating systems were not invented yet. I am as old as dirt.
ReplyDeleteI'm getting back into college after being out 13 years or so.... I'm still getting used to these kids (shakes cane in fury) looking at me like I'm supposed to be teaching them instead of sitting with them. It's like "Nope, I'm a newbie on this subject too..." The conversations I encounter are enough to make me go home and drink things they still get carded for!
ReplyDeleteI got a typewriter for a HS graduation present and used it my freshperson year (ha) to type my papers. When I moved off campus and had a roommate who was lucky/rich enough to own a desktop computer, I was able to use that (WordPerfect!) to type my papers & use her dot matrix printer. I also remember having to set my alarm to get up during the middle of the night to register for classes on our touch tone telephone. It took for.ev.er to register because ... wrong number typed in, no workie; class full, no bueno (you had to hurry and look up another section). I also had a phone card to call home (once a week). And, I was expected to write letters (by hand) and mail them (yes, with stamps) to my parents, friends, etc. (I miss that). Writing papers took forever because you actually had to go the library and look up books in the card catalog and *hope* they weren't checked out. If they were, you had to go back to the card catalog and try again. In some ways college is much easier for my kids due to technology, but the social cost is high (kids aren't as independent, they are maturing much later, aren't as resourceful, etc.)
ReplyDeleteThat's such an interesting point. On the one hand, the kids now have so much more information at their fingertips and are probably so much more informed than I was at their age. On the other hand, I know that that isolation from family and being forced to figure out the world without a smartphone at my fingertips forced me to grow up really quickly at 18. I would love to hear more about this from someone who is watching their kids go through college now.
DeleteOur two are in college right now just starting their 2nd years.... it's been so interesting to compare their experience to our own. We talk about it all the time and how we can help them to be more independent, resourceful, problem-solving, etc. I think part of this shift is the ease & immediacy of technology, social connections vs. in-person connections, having access to parental help 24/7 and some of it is due to the fact that parents don't allow their kids the independence they had because of safety concerns, more free time to run them around, wanting to help them as much as possible, etc.
DeleteWe used "first year" at my college too, because it was a women's college and "freshman" feels EXTRA dumb when there...are no men. Let's see, I went to college in 2011 and moved in during a tropical storm, just like today-times.
ReplyDeleteI remember I got my first cell phone at 19 years old. It was a Nokia flip phone and SO SMALL compared to what had been before. It was another 3 years before a friend tried to teach me to text and I remember being sooo irritated at these annoying sounds the phone made and not being able to figure out why they were making the sounds or how to make it stop. And then T9 texting!?!?! I remember feeling accomplished when I was decently 'typing' 5? words a minute.
ReplyDeleteIn Palau everyone had 2003 Nokia phones so I had relearn how to T9 and you might be pleased to know that it really is like riding a bike. By my second text I was texting as fast as I type on a laptop.
DeleteMy senior year in high school we got excited because the chalkboard in the band room was covered with a cut off shower wall to create a dry erase board .
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI am a little sad to see that I am older than most of your readers. I started college in 1988 and there were no cell phones or personal computers at first. I do think technology took great leaps during that time. By the time I graduated in 1992, we had a 286 desktop computer and a bag phone. I can relate to the comment about anxiety. I really feel for my children dealing with the pressures and irritations of the social-media age. But, I had to drive home from college about 5 hours by myself. I remember being very afraid/anxious to travel so I filled up my car and drove straight through.
ReplyDeleteI started college in 1986. There were no cell phones, no laptops, no personal computers. You called home once a month on the pay phone in the dining hall. Papers were typed out on an actual typewriter. One girl had one that had a nifty screen that kept the last 10 characters typed so you could correct one of the 10 before it actually typed it on the paper. I made sure she was my friend. Otherwise, white out was your friend... To register for classes, you went to the conference hall and stood in lines. If the class filled up before you got to the front, you had to frantically search your paper catalog to come up with a replacement class and then go stand in that line crossing your fingers. To do research, you had to actually go to the library, when everyone was researching the same thing it was a race to see who got there first and checked out the books needed. If you were not first, you used the card catalog, which was on actual cards, to try to creatively come up with other references that were not checked out that might work. Alternatively you stalked people in the library asking them for the books when they were done. There was not even a computer lab on campus unless you were in programming.
ReplyDeleteCollege (undergrad) was 27 years ago for me. I had a Brother typewriter for the profs who insisted on typed stuff, but many would accept hand written work as well. I had killer handwriting back then. Cell phones didn't exist and the only house phone for the dorms was in the lobby, so you had to wait your turn to use it. Calling home cost a fortune, so that didn't happen very often. The only TVs were in the lobby, too. No cable, just broadcast channels. All the other girls in the dorm crowded around it to watch Friends (not reruns, the original airing), and I went out there alone during the next hour to watch Star Trek: the Next Generation, because I was the resident nerd.
ReplyDeleteNow I am back in college working on my master's. I'm the "class mom" in nearly every class I take, because most of the rest of the students are the same age as my children. I've been nearly run over several times by other students walking and texting, and I am so jealous of the undergrads who now have all the Google answers tucked away in their jeans pocket!
I remember capturing my college experience using a 35mm camera, and always paying extra to get the one-hour rush service rather than the much less expensive 24 hour option just to see how many good pictures I got versus the blurring ones, the finger-blocked ones, or the people not looking into the camera ones. The ratio was always in favor of the crappy pictures.
ReplyDeleteFreshman is going to become my "F-bomb".
ReplyDeleteI teach middle schoolers and none of them were alive for 9/11. It makes me feel super old when they all ask "what was it like to be alive then?!?"
ReplyDeleteI was a senior in high school when I first saw a commercial for text messaging on certain flip phones. I remember thinking, "That's so stupid. Why go through all that trouble when you could just call and ask that question?" Thirteen years later, I get annoyed when I get phone calls that could easily be resolved via text.
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing you must live next to Westminster.
ReplyDeleteI was a senior in college when The Facebook started and you could only join if you were going to an approved college. My only facebook friends were in college. It soon opened up to everyone.
ReplyDeleteThis has to be Westminster. They take their social consciousness Very Seriously there. Back when the world was still sane and people managed to make it through entire weeks without being offended by something, I went to college as a freshman and lived in an apartment because that's what the cool kids did. I wasn't cool, but my new classmates didn't need to know that. No dorm life for me. I regret nothing.
ReplyDeleteI typed my papers on my sister's old electric typewriter, using my newest discovery: erasable bond paper. It was post-white-out and pre-correcting-tape. I measured up from the bottom of the page to figure out how much room I needed for footnotes. I didn't type a word until everything was completely done in long-hand, because any edits meant retyping the whole freaking thing. Because footnotes.
Then I got a boyfriend with a cutting-edge desktop IBM. He was a computer science major, and one of only three people I knew with their own computer. He introduced me to WordPerfect, angel choruses sang in the heavens, and I threw away my erasable bond paper. I eventually married him, and I'm not entirely certain it wasn't for his computer. I still had a year of college to finish, after all.
I kid. He also had a nice butt.
Other things that have changed: we dressed up for school. Every day. Hair and makeup, put-together outfits, the whole thing. None of this PJs-and-sweats thing. We cared in the 80s. We had a Look to achieve, and we woke up early to achieve it.
I registered for classes over the phone, using the brand-spanking-new system--previous to that, you went to a big room in a big building and stood in line for each class, hoping it wouldn't fill up before you got up to the desk. Add/drop was still a line-standing proposition, so there was no frivolously signing up for things that you might choose to drop later. Not for the non-masochists, anyway.
There was no email. There was no internet. There were no cell phones. We had a land line that we couldn't call long-distance on, so there were very few calls to our parents. Calling collect was expensive. The clever ones called collect, had the operator announce the call, then hung up before their parents could accept the charges, so the parents would know to call them back direct. Apparently I went to school with a lot of law-skirters.
There is a lot to like about today's technology. A lot. But there was a lot to like about the old days, too, before everyone became neurotic about which filter to use in Snapchat. We went on actual dates, had phone conversations, talked to each other face to face. We weren't socially stunted.
Oh, but we also bought all of our textbooks full-price in the college bookstore, and hoped we'd be lucky enough to find a used copy. There weren't any alternatives. I dreaded buying any of the science texts because they were huge and ridiculously expensive. I have two kids in college now, and they pay about a fifth of what I paid for books. Renting and e-books changed everything. Now that's progress!
The missionary we had over for supper tonight was born the year I graduated from high school. How does that even happen?!
ReplyDeleteThe first week of my freshman year, a boy we had just met yelled down the hall and asked my roommate and I if we were on Facebook. We spent the entire walk back to our dorm discussing what in the world he was talking about. Was it that little magazine they gave us at orientation with the names, pictures, and majors of every incoming freshman? WHAT WAS THIS NONSENSE??? We figured it out sometime in the next few weeks. Also, this was when you had to have a school issued email address to have an account so you didn't have to worry about Grandma seeing what you had been up to that week....
ReplyDeleteIn high school I didn't have my own cell phone but my mom gave me hers when my parents dropped me off at freshman week. (We had a whole week dedicated to the F-word!!). I didn't text much, but spent many a class period playing Snake.
My roommate had a laptop, but it was pretty pointless because she had to be at her desk in our dorm room to use the internet.
We bought all our text books at the campus book store for 15731453 dollars and on buy-back day, we would take the $18 we got in refunds and go eat at the Fazoli's on the edge of campus. :)
Also, we typed things like the above :) on AIM because there were no emojis!
As my teenage children like to remind me, I started college in the Nineteen Hundreds. The 90's, but still. The summer after I graduated high school my parents (who I guess hated me since they did not feel the need to helicopter my life) watched me and a friend back out of our Illinois driveway to drive all the way to Denver, Colorado, with no GPS or cellphone. And we lived to tell about it. I should mention that the trip was made in my Ford Festiva, so the fact that we made it to the mountains and back really is exceptional.
ReplyDeleteWhen I finally made it to college I remember sitting in the lobby of my dorm in line on Sunday afternoons, waiting to use a calling card on a payphone to call my parents for a few minutes. I wrote letters on this stuff we used to call "stationary" to my family and friends whom I could not afford to call because long distance was expensive.
Now days I am a librarian at a college and I sometimes want to roll my eyes so hard I feel like I might have a stroke (while trying to muster actual compassion) when kids cry to me about being homesick because they haven't gotten to talk to their mom since yesterday and their BFF is busy and hasn't returned their texts for an hour.