Tag: Gen X

On parenting a fellow geek

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, ParentingLeave a comment

I am too old for Pokémon.

That is more literal and less insulting a statement than it might seem. I am about to turn fifty this summer and I spend a positively unhealthy proportion of my income on comic books and Legos. I spend so much money on Legos that I am noticing that the technically-proper singular (it’s “Lego,” not “Legos,” believe it or not) is starting to sneak into my vocabulary; I am not someone who can accuse anyone of being too old for anything they enjoy except under circumstances of the most rank hypocrisy.

No, what I mean is I was born a couple of years too early for Pokémon to be a part of my youth. This is the real dividing line between Gen X and the Millennials, people; if Pokémon was a part of your childhood or late adolescence, or your friends’ childhood or late adolescence, you’re a Millennial. If it wasn’t, you’re either a Gen Xer or a girl, and we all know girls don’t count.

(That was a joke, shut up.)

My son has been into Pokémon since he was three or four. He has absorbed all of this shit entirely on his own, because his mother and I don’t know a damn thing about it. And he has only just now, at the ripe old age of fourteen, decided that he wants to learn how to play the game. And he is putting together a “deck,” which is a thing you use for card games, apparently, and he and I spent two hours at a soon-to-be-going-out-of-business card and game store today searching through thousands and thousands of bulk Pokémon cards in hopes of finding the exact cards he wanted.

We were, all told, more successful than I might have guessed going in. That thing up there, or at least one of them, is a Toxel, and goal #1 was to find a Toxel card. We found a few different ones and he just kept adding goals as we continued to sort through huge boxes of cards; I kept one eye out for the stuff he was looking for (any “dragon” types, any cards in Japanese, just for the hell of it, fairy types, and a half-dozen or so specific Poképeople) and another out for anything with a ridiculous enough name that I wanted to buy it. We were spending $20 for all the cards we could fit into a specific box, and that was hundreds of cards, so I really could grab any card I found momentarily interesting without worrying about whether it was any good or he was going to reject it. He announced that he wants me to play with him; normally my son expressing a wish to spend time with me under any circumstances is a great thing; that said, I’ve managed to avoid getting into CCGs for all this time for a reason– I know how my brain works and these shits can get expensive when you’re not taking advantage of a store closing.

He said something about wanting to learn Magic: The Gathering the other day, too, and I told him he was allowed to play it as soon as he got a job and could buy the cards himself. I will happily give him a car on the day he gets his driver’s license; I draw the line at Magic cards.

The punch line is he’d rather have the cards.

I’m not sure if that makes me a winner as a parent or not.

A BRAND-NEW complaint about young people!

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

We are all familiar with the common Old gripe about how Kids These Days can’t read analog clocks. This is a true thing about young people, but I genuinely have a hard time caring about it too much. Reading analog clocks is a skill that is easy to pick up when it becomes necessary and it is kind of hard to imagine how one’s life might genuinely be impacted by an inability to read one. Also, if you really want to make these people sputter, ask them if they can use a slide rule or an abacus, because Kids These Days can’t read clocks for exactly the same reason that most old people can’t use slide rules or abaci any longer.

That said, I have a complaint about young people and telling time, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen anyone else griping about it anywhere, so I demand credit when this becomes the new big complaint about The Yoots. Who are an entirely distinct group of humans from The Roots, despite what my autocorrect might think.

Kids these days have an almost frightening inability to deal with chronal inconsistency.

Perhaps I should explain.

Anyone who grew up in a world with analog clocks and analog watches and VCRs and anything that had to have its time set manually got used to the idea that we were never 100% sure what time it was, and it didn’t really matter. You might have ten different clocks or watches in your house and even assuming your VCR or your microwave wasn’t flashing 12:00 all the time, those ten clocks were probably displaying at least three or four different times. Even worse, sometimes we set clocks a few minutes fast on purpose! I only recently broke myself of the habit of setting the clock in my car ahead a few minutes, because never once did it actually help me get somewhere on time, which was supposed to be the whole point of doing such a thing.

Maybe it was 10:02. Maybe it was 10:03 or 10:01, or maybe it was 10:05! It really didn’t matter. Unless you were trying to catch a TV show at a specific time, being off by a minute or two was just never a big deal. Remember how sometimes in movies or TV shows they’d have a moment where they made a big deal about synchronizing watches? When was the last time you saw someone do that?

My son will occasionally ask me what time it is. I will look at my watch and, in the manner of an Old, I will probably round a little bit rather than provide him the precise time. Woe betide me if he happens to glance at a clock and notice I was wrong. It’s the same thing if I’m telling him how long he has to do something. “You’ve got ten minutes.” If I approach him again at minute nine, we have a problem.

Now, you might think that’s just my kid? Nah. I put up a new digital clock in my classroom this year, which previously, in the manner of most school classrooms, only had an analog clock above the door, which, remember, a lot of them can’t read. If that clock is one minute off from the time their iPads tell them it is– which is the same time their watches tell them, which is the same time their phones tell them, and there’s not even an iPhone/Android divide here because they all pull the Actual Time from the same place– I start hearing about it. And they cannot comprehend why I am not constantly adjusting the clock in my classroom to precisely synchronize with the bell schedule or the Real Time on their devices. I, an Old, don’t give a shit about a clock being a minute off. My students, Youngs one and all, absolutely cannot handle the ambiguity. It’s not just one kid and it’s not just one class. It happens all the time. I’m at the point where I’m going to set the thing an hour off just to see if any of them die from it.

These kids have Known the Time for their entire lives. They have always had constant access to a device that hooks up to the One True Time, a molecular clock in, I dunno, I assume Switzerland or some shit like that, and every device they have agrees on what time it is, always. And they cannot find a way to live like we lived. And it’s hilarious.

Someone solved the math question I posted yesterday, and I was pleasantly surprised with the percentage of my students who noticed on their own that I’d put the answers to today’s assignment on the board. I did end up working a couple of them out for students, just to prove that I was asking them something that they knew how to do, even if it was a pain in the ass. Here, with only a couple of shortcuts that I assume any adult mathematician can handle, is the full solution to the equation. Please forgive my crappy handwriting, especially the way all the Vs look like check marks and that really sloppy 5 in the first line: