Recently a friend of mine who is a radio dj back home emailed me and said that he was going to be giving a "career day" talk to a class at my old High School. He even named the teacher and it happened to be my old Algebra teacher who appears to still be teaching the same class some 17 yeas later. She was very strict and would yell at you if stared out the window for a few seconds when I was her student.
So I asked him how it went the next day and he said, "every kid had a computer at their desk and they pretty much watched Youtube videos the entire time that I was talking to them." I asked him if the teacher was present and he said that yes she was there but she didn't say anything to the kids while they were doing this.
Man, how amazingly different it must be to be a kid these days. You have every little thing you need right there on the internet and you have access to it at school all day long at your desk and I guess that teachers are somewhat more hesitant these days to discipline a kid for fear of being reported or god forbid some sort of retaliation.
I used to stay up late watching Headbangers Ball when I was a kid just hoping to catch a certain video that I hadn't seen in a long time. Now, kids can just pull up whatever video they want to on Youtube and watch it over and over. The thrill of building a tape or cd collection is completely lost to digital files now. Gone are the days of waiting for an album to be released. If you search hard enough you can find a song onlline before the band has even left the studio. There's no more use for a library when all the research you need is online. What's the point in even attending classes? Will there be a time in the future when teachers just start putting up lectures on Youtube?
What is there for kids to do for fun or exploration now besides video games and Youtube? I've spent time myself fooling around bored on Youtube and come accross videos that kids have filmed on their phones of other kids fighting at school or smoking pot in back of the school, etc. Is that all there is left for kids to do now? Film stupid shit and post it online and see what kind of comments their video will get? Is that what it's like to be in high school now? You just go to school and surf the net all day?
