School Experiences Baby Boomers Had That Are Gone Forever

Over the last half-century, the concept of school has changed both a lot and not at all. This said, there is no question that the rise of personal and consumer technology has impacted schools forever. For baby boomers, life before computers was both simpler and arguably more difficult.

Turning in a thousand-word paper written by hand as opposed to being typed on Microsoft Word is a quite different experience. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some school experiences baby boomers had that are gone forever.

Try as we might, finding a globe in a classroom today is going to be pretty challenging. However, for baby boomers, before Google Maps and Google Earth, globes were all the rage. When it was time for a geography lesson, teachers would grab a globe and spin it around to find the right location. Today, interactive maps and Google Earth have all but replaced this once wonderful classroom tool.

If you are a baby boomer, there is a better-than-good chance you had a report card handwritten by your teacher. No matter what, these handwritten grades came home with you. If they were bad, your parents were not happy but if your grades were good, ice cream usually followed. Today, grades are almost entirely online and available with just a few clicks.

Well before the internet, teachers and baby boomers alike kept organized with contacts by using a Rolodex machine. It was a sure thing to find one of these contraptions on the desk of a teacher or administrator. The days of completely analog parent info are long gone and have been replaced by an online directory. This makes it super easy for teachers to find parents and vice versa.

Okay, so overhead projectors are not completely gone, but they are not as widely used as they were for baby boomers. In today’s school system, you have smartboards and projectors that have eliminated the need for overhead projectors. Simply stated, the overhead projector was a less-than-perfect system that was hardly interactive.

Like the overhead projector, library research feels like it’s been diminished so much since the birth of the internet. You can now find the same amount of data in a few minutes on the internet as you would in a few hours at a library. You also don’t need to worry about index cards and catalog numbers anymore since everything is just easier to find these days.

When you played a movie in the baby boomer era, it mostly came through a whirring projector and the noise was unmistakable. You had flickering images on screen, which is a very different experience than what you see today. When I was a kid, it was all about the rolling TV stand but today it’s all about computers and DVDs.

As much of the workforce required great handwriting during the baby boomer era, it wasn’t uncommon for penmanship classes to be offered. This was in addition to learning to write in cursive, a skill that is seemingly lost today. Especially for those entering the workforce as secretaries, penmanship skills were an absolute must to get hired.

Oh, what life was like before the days of TI (Texas Instrument) scientific calculators. Baby boomers had the joy of using slide rules, something kids these days couldn’t pick out of a crowd. You had to understand quite a bit about math to use one of these, but you don’t have to worry about that anymore. Download an app or buy an inexpensive scientific calculator and you have everything you need.

Long before the copy machine became a standard in schools everywhere, the mimeograph machine came to the rescue. This machine enabled teachers to make “photocopies” of classroom assignments. The challenge was that the copies would smell like ink and could easily smudge. Thankfully, today’s students will never know the pain of smudging ink.