You know you are getting old when you ask the waiter to remove half the ingredients on the plate as you know in the morning you will have an upset stomach ...... Red onions I hate you!!!!

Your third RPG has been out of print for ten years, and your first has been out of print for almost thirty.

Also, people stopped typing words for numbers. ^_^

This morning in a staff meeting I referenced something that I thought was fairly new or at least recent (Mulder and Scully from the X-Files) and had to explain the reference to half the people in the room.

In reply to Grimmond (msg # 93):

Ouch!

In class, a friend and I were translating a passage on Clinton's work before he became president. A younger classmate said, "I'm confused because the gender's wrong."

I was in line to enter the Paul McCarthy concert last year and someone mentioned his former band and one of the "kids" behind me (a Gen-X'er ?) said "You mean he was in a band before Wings ?"

Of course we prefer to forget about Wings. :)

You know you're getting old when you read through a list like this and identify with more than half of them.

When kids refuse to play games that you would kill for, just because they are not on a current gen system...

I know nes is a LONG gap from ps3... but seriously?

When I bought an snes for literally 2 dollars and it came with  a couple dozen games. It worked too.

Or when you can't figure out how this confounded machine works so you CAN look through the list.

In MY DAY...All we had were those old wood burning computers......

Pretty sure that's just a failure of the educational system at large and/or stupid people.

Or for some reason you never said 'Bill' or 'former president' -- he's been pretty quiet for the last decade while Hillary has not been. Any time someone says 'Clinton' on TV or the news at large these days, 99% is about Hillary.

EDIT: *Rant about public education despite full intellectual understanding it was never great to begin with.*
This message was last edited by the user at 01:28, Tue 24 June 2014.

It was a portion of an article printed in one of our textbooks. It didn't state his first name and didn't have a picture. She was just so worked up over the tenses and pronouns. And she kept repeating, "How can it say 'before the Clinton Administration'? She hasn't been elected yet!"

I think she's just nervous about the next exam, but my friend and I had a good laugh about feeling old.

Should have told her that the printers had sent the wrong textbooks, and the one she had obviously shouldn't have been issued for another ten years.

That would have really exploded her head...  :p

In reply to kouk (msg # 102):

It isn't a failure of the education system, it's a success.

The education system here in America is a slightly modified version of the Prussian education system which was explicitly designed to make the populace just barely proficient to do their jobs effectively, make them gullible and easy to control politically at least, and limiting their desire for further education (hence waiting until age 5-6 before teaching kids how to read). We have made some changes, but many are worse, such as the lack of discipline (which actually make people less easy to keep peaceful, but still rather easy to manipulate). Though a handful are good, like those groups that run early ed preschools, though to my understanding, most of those are private rather then public.

There are 3 and 4 year old programs that do help kids. But they are for the very poor, or those who can afford em, no middle ground if I remember right.

On reading ages:
My almost 4 year old can recognize his name, and the letter H, I try to teach him, but 99% of the time he just wants to draw and will not cooperate.

The problem with teaching kids, especially younger kids, is that they are not dogs, they are cats.  Dogs are relatively easy to train.  You train them to sit and they'll sit there.  You put a treat on their nose and tell them to sit and they will eagerly sit there for a good couple minutes waiting for you to give the command to toss it up and eat the treat.  Cats won't do that.  Cats can be "trained".  You get them accustomed to using the litterbox in a particular place and then you slowly move it, eventually you put it in the toilet forcing them to stand on the rim and then you cut out the bottom and then you remove it eventually, so you've now "trained" your cat to jump up on the rim and use the litterbox.  It's not really clicker training or real training like a dog, you've just slowly accustomed your cat to doing what it was going to do anyway but in a different way or place.

You can't take it personally when kids don't react the way you expect them to react.  Everything, especially for kids who are too young for "regular school", it has to be fun, everything has to be a game.  If they get too frustrated, you can only press them so far or you'll lose them.

Take pet training again.  Some people think that if their animal makes a mess on the carpet that if they press the animal's nose into it then animal will learn to associate that and stop it.  No.  Animal's memory and attention tends to be shorter than that and what they learn is that when you grab them you're going to do a smelly awful thing to them and they start hiding and running from you more often.  If you're around the carpet more often, this might also have the desired effect of them not making a mess on the carpet unless you're gone for a long while, but the side effects are probably not at all what you intended.  You can only punish and reward "in the moment" and the rewards have to be bigger than the punishments or you'll start to lose them.

So you can't sit down and teach kids that young, you have to go play a game with them and the game can certainly incorporate all those things that you want to teach them, but teaching kids is really like herding cats.  You can certainly train cats to use the toilet instead of the carpet when they want to go to the bathroom.  You can get cats to come and go on command and all sorts of other tricks.  But for the most part it's nothing like training dogs.  Kids that age don't cooperate with you, you have to cooperate with them if you really want to get anywhere.

That's actually a large part of my job, to work with and teach kids.  When you jump in and play with them while teaching them, it's a blast and you can have so much fun and accomplish so much.

-----

And you know you're getting old when a much younger coworker is astonished that the kids you're working with have never heard of the television program that she grew up watching and that you never watched because it was just too young for you.  I don't even remember what television show she was talking about last week, which perhaps is another sign of old age, but I remember feeling more old than usual when that happened. :p
This message was last edited by the user at 15:10, Tue 24 June 2014.

Well said Genghis. I know blues clues and super reader are helping a little. I have no training in teaching kids, so I can only try and thats better then nothing I suppose.

See teenagers pregnant makes me feel old...

The other day I made an idle comment while visiting with some family that I found my sister's old gameboy in the garage. One of my cousins, who was only about twelve or so, didn't know what I was talking about. I had to tell them it was an early version of the DS for them to understand. I'm only twenty! I shouldn't be feeling old!

Seeing pregnant teenagers outside of a school makes me feel old... when I realize that those are actually the teachers.

Makes me feel old?.....knowing I am at that age where I will be going to more funerals than weddings

Just remember, as you age, they say memory is the second thing you lose.

The first is...

Um...

It was...ummm...

Damn.

I feel old when I explained to some kids that Pokemon started when I was there age. (and they don't believe me)
Or telling them about the Original Transformers cartoon shows. How Megatron would turn in to a hand gun. (Though I agree with them that is a lame transformation)

when you realize you have been playing role-playing games for 37 years.

Hush, little baby.  Don't be afraid.  Soon you'll have a foot in the grave.

Though, I hope you live long and prosper.  I don't mean that in a more creepy way than it naturally sounds.
This message was last edited by the user at 23:10, Tue 24 June 2014.