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Digital-age thinking in younger people

I'll try to put the newer ones first. Some go back to early Nintendo days.

Sandra Dodd, when Kirby was five and Marty was just nearly three (two days before Marty's birthday):

January 12, 1992

On the same day two related things happened: In the morning Marty and Kirby were playing with Lego, and had a make-believe game going, and Marty (needing to go to the toilet or something) said, "Pause it—pause it." Kirby said, "There’s not a pause."

That evening Kirby was talking about Jeff and Jennifer (who were living in California, where we had visited them) and asking when they were coming to our house. I said May, and then in September when they get married. He said, “They’re not married yet?”

No.

"But how come they kiss? They were kissing at the beach."

So I talked to him about kissing and he said, "But they live together," so I talked to him about living together, and that when people just live together they can change their minds anytime, but if they’re married they can’t. I told him Keith and I lived together before we got married. He asked what would have happened if I didn’t want to live with him anymore, and I said you mean a long time ago or when we were married? and he said a long time ago. I said I would say "I’m sorry Keith, but this isn’t fun and I don’t want to live with you anymore."

Kirby said (with concern), "You would reset marry Daddy?"


Hema, quoting Zoya:
"Kill me quickly Raghu, I want to go to the bathroom."

Level up!

This happened in 2012, at an Always Learning Live symposium, in Albuquerque.
Once Heather Booth joked to me, at a symposium, that she was there to "level up," in unschooling. 🙂

Renee Cabatic was there, too, and I remember smiles and a realization that it was a legitimate plan and goal.

People do it, all the time. I guess she wasn't joking.

SandraDodd.com/levelup

July 2022, West Yorkshire:


Jen Keefe wrote:
Sydney (7) wanted to make sure she was spelling "Girl Scout Cookies For Sale" correctly for her sign, so she asked Siri how to spell it.

I went over to offer my help to make sure it was giving the correct results for her (thinking any number of results could have come up in the search). "No mom" she said "I just look at what I said. Siri types it out every time."

Yet another shift in how I see things and I found myself shaking my head in amazement.


Phoebe Wyllyamz added something similar:
My son likes to skype and game with us and friends. He will keep a google window open and when he wants to type something out quickly he will use the google microphone search to say what he wants typed out and then copy and paste it into his chat. He figured that out all on his own. Pretty ingenious.


Sandra Dodd, September 2023:
Tommy (3, a granddaughter of ours) was playing with a wind-up car, yesterday. Wind-up toys might have a key, but this has a knob. Some others around the house have other sorts of winding mechanisms, no proper "key," so the name for those various things is.... winder? Knob. "Twist this thing."

Tommy called it the charger. That makes more sense than anything. After all these years, a little kid can name a class of mechanical parts in terms of electronic gadgetry she's used to.



Learning

Clarity