I was going to call this blog entry “The Old Days” but then I realized that wasn’t the way it would have been pronounced back then. ‘Olden’ is the old way we said it. So that’s how I’ll say it now because I am going to demonstrate that

  • I’m old.
  • I’m not smart.

The way I’m going to show that I’m old is that I am going to claim that I know about things that happened a long time ago from first-hand knowledge, as opposed to only reading about them.

I will prove that I’m not smart because I’m going to talk about the olden days even though I know that nobody listens when people talk about them. If people do listen, it’s only because they have to, as in, “Listen to your elders!” In that case, though, they aren’t really listening. Instead of listening they are actually thinking, “When will this be over?” This, of course, is how it used to be in school in the olden days when the teacher did all of the talking and students sat up straight “listening.” This form of discourse is known as ‘the lecture method’ which was the dominant form of talk in classrooms in the olden days. Modern teachers are concerned about things like ‘engagement’ and ‘meaning’ whereas in the olden days teachers had no such concerns. They didn’t care if students learned anything. The main things teachers cared about in the olden days was whether students were listening, which meant they had their eyes open.

In the olden days parents didn’t have as many things to worry about as they do now. This is true because in the olden days parents could not buy their kids bottled water to drink. The very idea of buying water would have been regarded as insane. People would have thought, “BUY WATER!? Go use the faucet!” The “conversation” would have been over, and the older people could have resumed lecturing.

The other thing that parents and teachers didn’t have to worry about in the olden days was safety. Safety wasn’t invented until sometime during the 1980’s. The gym teacher and I were talking about this the other day. We realized that in the olden days athletes didn’t get to drink water on hot days. First of all, there were no such things as water bottles (which might explain why there wasn’t any bottled water). The other reason we couldn’t drink water during practice on hot days was that people thought that you would get stomach cramps and be unable to play. If you got hurt playing a sport in the olden days, you didn’t get to see a physical therapist. You got “taped up” and put back in the game. But of course, tape doesn’t work for stomach cramps, so we learned to endure cotton mouth and verbal abuse from older people who took advantage of the fact that we couldn’t talk.

Nowadays we think that teachers should teach so that students actually learn things. We have things like ‘curriculum’ and ‘testing’ to see if this is happening. These weren’t necessary when students had cotton mouth and could only listen. Back then, everyone knew that if kids were listening that was good enough. They didn’t care what kids thought. Now we encourage kids to TALK and ask questions, which in the olden days were punishable offenses. Teachers in schools now have to be “conversational” so that we can “individualize” and “meet each child’s needs.”

Now that I’ve proven that I am old and not smart, feel free to use any of the above information to help you ignore what I had to say. Thanks for “listening”.