Tomorrow is the first day of our academic semester here at Miami, our welcome to the class of 2021.
First of all…
Now that I’ve made a Sealab 2021 joke, I want to do my own spin on that email that goes around every year. Our students are generally 18 (some younger, some non-traditionals). That means many of them were born in 1999 or 2000.
They never knew the fear of the y2K bug.
9/11 happened when they were one-years-old and not yet even in pre-school.
Seinfeld has only existed for them in reruns.
They’d have no recollection of a Presidency before George W. Bush.
They have never actually known America in peacetime, unless they have memories of being one.
Their New England Patriots have always been coached by Bill Belichick.
They’ve always had South Park and Family Guy in some capacity.
This is their old, ugly all-in-one Mac machine:
When they were born, half of the country was on the internet.
Few of them probably remember the dial-up modem sound, and they most certainly can’t remember everyone trying to jockey for a cord.
They were 8-years-old when the first iPhone hit the market.
They always had digital music and players.
They only know what mix tapes are due to our nostalgia and need to discuss it.
They can’t remember a time when there wasn’t a scrolling ticker at the bottom of the news.
MTV was never a channel that primarily showed videos for them. In fact they much more likely think of YouTube as the home of music videos.
They’d be confused if you called a PC an IBM.
To them, Ron Howard is an old director guy, Clint Eastwood is a crazy old director guy who had a fight with a chair on TV (or is the title of a Gorillaz song), and Adam West was the mayor of Quhoag.
They don’t realize that chokers aren’t a new fashion choice.
Michael Jordan is more famous for his shoe brand than playing basketball in their world.
They’ve never even heard of a Pog.
They’ve never had to use a card catalog.
They’ve never had to wait to find a research librarian and spend hours on end trying to figure out a simple fact like the population of Rio. It’s 6.32 million, btw. I found that out faster than I typed the question into Google.
The primary definition of “surf” was never the thing we do on boards for them, and in fact they think it’s cute when we use that word for internet browsing.
They have no idea what Tab is.
There’s always been a Euro in their world
There’s also always been a Spongebob Squarepants.
The Columbine shootings are something they were told about, but they’ve never known the world before that became the reference point for all school violence.
They never knew a world before MySpace or Napster, though both of those things were getting stale by the time they hit the internet.
They have never received an AOL install disk unironically.
They grew up with at least five of the seven Star Wars movies and have no frame of reference for all those years between the first three and the prequels. They probably had Jar Jar Binks toys.
They never lived in a world without The Matrix. That’s an “old” movie in their minds.
Their Green Goblin was a weird guy in a techno suit on a glider. Their Batman was probably Christian Bale. Stallone and Swarzenegger were too old to be their action heroes (though they still tried).
annnnd…
They never knew a world without Starbucks, even in the midwest.
Treat these new folks with care.
Most of our jokes are too old for them, yadda yadda yadda, avoid the Noid!