Tuesday, August 21, 2012

The Annual "Make You Feel Old List"

Little Beloit College has a great gig going where they get lots of publicity at the start of every school year by putting out The Mindset list designed to give college professors insight into this year's incoming  freshling (freshling: less sexist but more offensive that freshmen) class. It's a fairly long list: 75 items so I am not going to post the entire thing, but you can read it here. I must comment on a few of my favorites, of course.

10. On TV and in films, the ditzy dumb blonde female generally has been replaced by a couple of Dumb and Dumber males.

I still see plenty of ditzy blondes on television.

15.  Having grown up with MP3s and iPods, they never listen to music on the car radio and really have no use for radio at all.

Bad news for the future of talk radio.

19.  The Green Bay Packers have always celebrated with the Lambeau Leap.

Just because most of you are in Wisconsin.

23.  Women have always piloted war planes and space shuttles.

Some of these are good things.

24.  White House security has never felt it necessary to wear rubber gloves when gay groups have visited.

Very good things.

40.  A bit of the late Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, has always existed in space.

Just cool.

45.  While the iconic TV series for their older siblings was the sci-fi show Lost, for them it’sBreaking Bad, a gritty crime story motivated by desperate economic circumstances.

A show that should keep anyone from doing meth.

60. History has always had its own channel.

Although it has gotten pretty sucky (Can you say "Ancient Aliens"?)

72.  Astronauts have always spent well over a year in a single space flight.

Actually, only two men have spent more than a year on a single spaceflight (a third spent 364 days on one flight) and the most recent one landed in 1999, so I think someone dropped the ball on this one.

What are your favorites? What did they miss?

6 comments:

OrbsCorbs said...

I have almost nothing in common with the young generation. What I consider high tech is already obsolete to them.

kkdither said...

A significant percentage of them will enter college already displaying some hearing loss.

-That is very sad. Kids are constantly plugged in to high output earbuds. Social skills are at a minimum level.

They grew up, somehow, without the benefits of Romper Room.

-I always wanted Miss Nancy to see me through her mirror.

Here is something the list didn't include:
Within the last 2 years or so, many, if not most high school kids no longer have or use email accounts.

They also don't know how to use MS Word, or know how to attach a file to email. Most teens include texting jargon in papers and do not understand it is plagiarism if they change a few words or cut and paste to compile a document from several online sources.

OKIE said...

I'd like them to try to use an electric typewriter, that is if they know what it is.

I'm with you Orbs. However, I still have faith in them even though they are in for some rude awakenings.

SER said...

Tomorrows kids are going to have eye problems staring at the video games

SER said...

they also predict todays kids are going to have back problems from hauling all the books in backpacs every day

hale-bopp said...

Ser, you might already be behind the times. WIth all the schools using digital textbooks on iPads, it won't be long before students can't figure out how to open a book!