I have a vague recollection of second grade. I recall my teacher was a young, energetic woman who got married during the school year and the entire class was invited to the ceremony. It was otherworldly in some ways for an eight-year-old, i.e., this person who teaches me everyday has a life outside our classroom and she kissed a guy in front of all of us!
I don’t recall anything in particular that I learned that year. I am certain of one thing, however, among them was not how to use PowerPoint. Perhaps it was because as brilliant as Bill Gates is, he too at the time was a second grader.
Yet my second-grader son Ethan has mastered PowerPoint as part of his second grade curriculum. Imagine my surprise a few weeks back when he announced that he was working on a PowerPoint presentation for the upcoming Open House at his school. Huh, what? Yes, everyone in the class was putting together a presentation on different elements of the rain forest. (I don’t think I even knew the rain forest existed when I was in second grade.)
As it turned out, Ethan became so good at PowerPoint he was among the first to finish his presentation, so he ended up helping some of his classmates finish theirs. In second grade terms, in other words, he completed their work for them. And the results were amazing. His class has a row of six computers with flat screen monitors and all simultaneously were showing the presentations when we entered the rain forest-themed classroom the evening of Open House.
It was another reminder for me of how far the world has come since I was a second grader in the ‘60s. At least once a week I am amazed at what Ethan is being taught and has learned. I was always a voracious reader, but he’s reading books (most recently, Black Beauty) that I didn’t read until I was years older. I guess some of this is because so much more has happened in our world, it seems the occurrence of events, breakthroughs and advancements are occurring at an accelerated pace.
Still, I remained impressed, albeit perhaps a little skeptical about his PowerPoint skills. That was until yesterday morning when he asked me if he could put together a PowerPoint presentation for his mother’s birthday. I said sure, but offered no help. So he fired up his laptop and the next thing I knew he was grabbing pictures from Google Images and inserting photos I’d taken. I was impressed, so I put a few more photos on a thumb drive, plugged it in, and son of a gun, he was downloading them and adding them to new slides!
While I was content using my crayons to construct thank you and birthday cards, here he is prepping his PowerPoint slide show for the occasion. We sure have come a long way. I can’t imagine what the teenage years will bring other than I better be prepared or highly sedated by then.
