Pizza and Homework

Last night, our son and his family came over for pizza and fussin' around: wife (Melissa), the two boys (Logan, 12; Carson, 8). The pizza was great (from Zeppe's, nearby), and later we walked down to Cold Stone Creamery, where everyone (except, of course, for Virtuous Me) had dessert. And while we were sitting there, Logan reminded me how much has changed since I retired from the teaching profession.

First of all, he had a homework assignment that was due by 11:59 p.m. that night. What? In my student days, that would have meant going over to the teacher's house, knocking on the door at 11:58:59, and handing him or her the assignment. This would have remained true throughout most of my teaching career--kids banging on my door near midnight ...

Not no more.

Logan's school uses the Internet--the kids have Google accounts and email--they write and file using Google Docs.

Now not all of that is totally foreign to me. In my final few years at Western Reserve Academy (WRA), we used some online platforms (right word?): first, Blackboard; then, Moodle. They were enormously convenient for me. I uploaded all assignment sheets and course outlines and supplementary material onto them--arranged for the dates to make them visible--and, voila! Kids could access their assignments and other material wherever there was an Internet connection.

I also (often) had the kids submit essays and other work via email attachment. I would mark and grade them using Word's "Review" feature; then I'd zap 'em back via email attachment. (One advantage for them: They could actually read what I had written--not always the case when I wrote by hand.) This was enormously convenient; I could, oh, grade and return papers while sipping coffee in the shop. Oh, and I could also post their grades online by using the school's version of GradeQuick.

These, of course, were mere hints of the future.

By the time I left WRA (at the end of the 2011 school year), I had one colleague (at least one), Kevin, who was already using Google Docs (and kind of wondering why I wasn't!).

Anyway, last evening, down at Cold Stone Creamery, Logan read aloud to us--on my iPhone, via Google Docs--an essay he'd written for Language Arts class, an essay about his seventh birthday, a day of mixed awesomeness and bad surprise (he got a haircut he didn't like!), a day that he recorded with wit and skill and heart. (Not bad qualities for a writer, eh?)

Remember in The Tempest when young and innocent Miranda, who's been living her whole life on an island with her father (and weird Caliban), sees some shipwrecked young men come ashore:

O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't! (5.1)

(Recall, by the way, that in Shakespeare's day, people used brave (as the OED reminds us) "as a general epithet of admiration or praise.")

So ... brave new world indeed. And our dear grandsons are living in some of its most wondrous and even magical realms.