Hydrogen Car vs. The Ipod: Why Does The Ipod Win?

One of my students showed me a picture of a hydrogen car. This student, who loves cars, then told me about the prototypes for a hybrid car, a total electric car, and even a solar powered car. Well, I say, its about time!

We talked about the technology of the future, and then he asked me what High School was like when I was his age. I told him he could research the subject by renting any number of John Hughes’ films like The Breakfast Club or Pretty in Pink. As you can see, some things stay the same—when asked off-topic subjects, teachers still suggest independent research projects. Yet he pressed me.

Well, here goes. I didn’t have a laptop yet, so all work in class involved pen and paper (when I tell friends that I assign 14 and 15 year-olds research and power point presentations on a set of classroom laptops, usually the response from older folks is not one of shock over the laptops, rather, “You know how to do Power Point?” ).

I told this student, that yes, way back in 1987, things were kind of different.

I had no Internet, so it never occurred to me to simultaneously check 150 national reviews for the same movie being released that week. Without GOOGLE , I even had to look things up, one by one, in a painstaking activity that involved something called the Readers Guide to Periodic Literature. This could take an entire Saturday. Now it takes a mouseclick.

Need a ride home from school? Calling Mom or Dad meant finding a quarter. Interruptions in class were verbal, not electronic, and my fingers remained nimble by writing and passing notes in class, not through text messaging on a cell phone.

We had no cell phones, CDs, DVDs, TiVos, Palm Pilots, Fax Machines, or the omnipresent Ipods that he and everyone came back to school with after the holiday break.

Nobody wasted weeks of sleepless nights on Xboxes or Playstations, although I did have an old Atari kicking around somewhere.

SUVs were for off-roading, Faxing was something only very large corporations did, and at my Dad’s bank, a state-of-the-art computer system took up an entire room.

Worst of all, there was no Starbucks, which meant no specialty coffees, which meant that Folgers was the height of caffeine sophistication.

Life was truly primitive in 1987. Fortunately, they had invented cash machines, Taco Bell drive-throughs, Gilligan’s Island re-runs, and my girlfriend’s gas-guzzling, beat-up Camero to get me through the hard times of high school.

Which brings us full circle.

Who is “they” exactly and how do they do it? How did they decode life into 1’s and 0’s so that today I can assign my students a filmmaking project on handheld digital video cameras that can be checked out from the school library and edited on school computers? More importantly, 1987 was 18 years ago, almost two decades ago. When will they get around to giving us those electric or hydrogen or solar power cars?

Now that is what I am looking forward to.

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