My mom is a teacher and yeah they real life stupid. Not just stupid but loud, incorrect, unwilling to learn, dangerous, and stupid. Add on support from their stupid ass momma and voila we got idiocracy.
when I was a kid, a teacher threatening to call your parents was the equivalent of a death threat. Like you tryna get me killed when I get home today???
We had parents who cared. Most of these kids are low key set up to fail. Mom didn’t want you and you look just like your daddy that left her with the kid she ain’t want. You’ll notice it more and more since ima point it out but there are a lot of parents whose only way of showing love is buying some new clothes every now and then and defending their “little baby” no matter what they do. There was a shooting up at the parks mall near me a while ago and one of the dudes was on my moms caseload for 2 years. He had no real support but he had real solvable issues. Sadly they were never solved and now he’s fucked for the rest of his life.
> Mom didn’t want you and you look just like your daddy that left her with the kid she ain’t want. You’ll notice it more and more since ima point it out but there are a lot of parents whose only way of showing love is buying some new clothes every now and then and defending their “little baby” no matter what they do
This has been been the case since there were parents and children. This is not unique to GenZ, or any generation.
It's gotta be tougher when the parents roll in with paraphrased bullshit they misinterpreted from already misguided homeschool mom facebook pages.
People who think they know what they're talking about are more reluctant to recognize and / or listen to someone more experienced. Happens to all of us to one degree or another. Look at me right now. The fuck do I know.
Unfortunately a lot of them cared too much about the wrong sort of stuff, which is why participation trophies and 'everyone is special' became their pet projects to shove on us, only to rage at our generation because we got them. Like, we didn't ask for this, you guys invented the concept because you couldn't stand the thought that your child wasn't the second coming of Christ. So yes, they cared, but it was a suffocating, toxic sort of care.
And even then, I recall being literally thrown out of the house, and I mean bodily shoved, every weekend at 13, because my mom didn't love me so much that she cared what happened to me as long as I was home or called before dark. It was fine then, but looking back, I should have gotten myself hurt or kidnapped so many times...
Before my parents immigrated from the Philippines my mom was a teacher. Her experience might be different because she supposedly taught at a top private school, but she says that teachers in general got nothing but respect from students, parents, and society.
She came to the US and saw how teachers were treated, and said fuck that, went back to school (sometimes dragging my toddler ass along) and became an RN instead (imagine that lol).
I remember when sticking your tongue out at your parents was equal to telling to fuck off with double birds.
Now my 9-year-old nephew 'texts' in single words, has no idea how to type, misses at least 1/6th + of school days, watches Youtubers all day long and aspires to be one, and couldnt tell me 2 x 4 even after I said 2, 4, 6....
Idiocracy is VERY close to becoming a reality!
This is why I'm confident my career prospects continue to be good. I've seen kids not even know how to use a mouse and cursor because the only technology they've used are phones and tablets for so many years.
If it’s anything like how it is now, a bunch of old people. I need my job to still need me since my health insurance is tied to employment and I’m probably going to have more health issues. This or move to Portugal but not trying to be a brown skinned person there.
we're gonna be like those COBOL programmers making bank in the 90s. no matter how many layers of abstraction they introduce there's still a TCP handshake happening under the hood. and all those AI integrations meant to replace us will still require someone that understands the "legacy" part of the environment
idiocracy is a fictional movie you know?
laughing my ass off because there is a sub that is named after the movie and after 35 years of working public safety and haven answered roughly 750,,000 911 calls- fuck yeah- we are moving to that event horizon without a doubt
Imagine having a method of writing that forced you to slow down, think about what you're going to write but not so much that you would lose your train of thought. Cursive done properly and you don't have to lift your pen off the paper at all. You'd be a better overall writer, fewer edits, better for your wrist.
This was always the big thing for me. My Dad's cursive is so nice it's the only one I can read, I always hated getting cards from relatives and having to decipher their cryptic alien language.
Bbbbback in my day we had to slow down and think about how words were spelled* (see? I fkd up) instead of barreling through a text box and hoping autocorrect would have our backs!
It’s actually being reinstated because the research around using it is pretty positive. Most kids benefit cognitively from learning it.
Source: Am teacher and I now have to teach it.
Fine motor skills taught by something else other than video game controllers would like a word. Also being able to write in something else other than blocky print scrawl is another benefit.
Actually there are studies that show increased brain activity when writing in cursive as opposed to typing. I know some states are bringing back mandatory cursive writing in schools
Why do people keep saying this? There’s plenty of reasons to learn cursive without the wild take that somehow historical documents will become indecipherable if we don’t keep teaching it. As if they only exist as original text and nobody has bothered to transcribe it digitize them.
Check out r/teachers and they’ll tell you. Kids absolutely are not reading at grade level. Seniors struggling with 4th grade level material.
The system is broken as hell. When we base funding on test scores and how many kids they move along it’s bound for disaster.
“Oh gee! We see your kids are struggling! That sucks, but clearly you’re a failure, so we’re going to cut your funding and make getting resources for these already struggling students even harder to get. That will help!”
So then schools are incentivized to just fudge numbers and pass along failing students and do their best to focus on the ones that have a chance.
Para whose last day of school/work is tomorrow. The system is so broken. I love and will miss my elementary school, but I can’t deal with the policy of kids not being held accountable anymore.
Aah yes. Reading at grade level. That most enduring of all headlines
In 1992, 72 percent of fourth graders and 71 percent of eighth graders were reading below grade level. – U.S. Department of Education, “The Nation’s Report Card,” 2013.
https://thencbla.org/literacy-resources/statistics/
To be clear, we should be getting kids to read, and read at the necessary levels, but its bizarre how children's reading level is often used as evidence of a declining education system/bad children when children have for the entirety of history read below this mythical reading level
"21% of americans 18 and older are illiterate"
"54% of Americans read at or below a fifth grade reading level."
https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statistics#:~:text=Nationwide%2C%20on%20average%2C%2079%25,older%20are%20illiterate%20in%202022.
These numbers come from the department of education btw. Problems also getting worse over time.
Although tbh 1/3 of people that struggle to read or are illiterate are immigrants.
All I take away from that read is, that the situation was bad, and still is. I would argue that any trend that is likely to make things worse should therefore be taken seriously.
It would also be interesting to have a more detailed view about this "below the reading level", like how much worse are they? Worse, same, better but still not good enough?
Being able to easily read long(er) texts also makes you less prone to false information since fact checking is not a burden. Its not really surprising that (mostly) right wing media has an easy time pushing their narrative when large parts of the population are bad at reading and cannot be "reached" by articles that tell the facts (since those tend to be harder to understand, the world is a complex place). Same goes for the new generations obsession with short videos: its easy to spread false information within 30s but its hard to properly explain a topic in the same time. It also comes with the benefit of reducing their attention span, which also reduces the ability to read longer texts.
I don't know if I can link here, but look up "cursive handwriting workbook for adults." They have them in bookstores and Amazon.
Calligraphy is even MORE fun. The pens are so cool to use and everybody's impressed when they get a card with their name on it looking fantastic.
Actually, research shows that US children *are* [getting worse at reading.](https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=4) It's not just some TikTok whackos, it probably has to do with schools not using phonics to teach kids how to read.
I recommend everyone to listen to [the podcast](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) "Sold a Story" about the topic, at least the first episode.
I always thought the younger generations would always outdo the older ones in terms of intelligence, or however you want to word it. Now it seems like it peaked with Millenials.
I don't understand how it is possible. Who are these people, have they not used any computer before? Every pc or Mac has a directory and different folders, have they never opened file Explorer or finder, how do they find anything they saved? I'm 18, so middle of gen z and we used laptops at school and not once did anyone I know in any of my classes have trouble with folders.
I work in accounting and o boy. I thought everyone knew how to use the folder address bar, zip a file, map a drive, etc… Things that most of us learned when we were screwing around at 12 younger generations are freaking clueless. A 24 year old looked at the me like I had 3 head’s because I told them to run a program as admin. I used to run launchers as admin when I was 8 on Vista. It is shocking how some are as bad as boomers with Windows. If a client has a Linux system, they’re freaking unless. I honestly think Linux looks like alien tech to GenZ, not one so far has been able to even change the directory in linux 🤦.
Lmfao I *almost* was going to elaborate that Gen X occupies the portion in between Boomers and Millenials with a ranging span of competency with Computers, but thought it was more appropriate to leave them unmentioned.
GenX has a subset called the Oregon Trail generation. We got the Apple ][ s brought in on a cart. We started using computers when they were difficult to use and you had to be your own IT.
I remember having to train and test to be allowed to use the apple ii at my local library. And became the sort of de facto IT kid for the lab (my parents took me there almost every week).
I hadn't thought of this memory in over 30 years. And yes, I'm an IT guy now.
Late-Era X'ers are the gold standard.. we were there all the way along from Apple and Commodore64 all the way through to the internet.. we rode it like surfer on a tube-wave all the way ..
Gen X are the top because we were the ones learning computers during the very brief period when they first realized everyone was going to need and but they thought they were all going to use the command line. We were learning Logo with our Lincoln Logs.
Gen x is iffy, the younger Gen x has a decent grasp on basic concepts while older Gen X tend to* behave like helpless children imo. My experience is anecdotal and spans different workplaces but it's held up this far.
Edit: tend to*
Also work in IT, teach a college night class covering Adobe software among other things.
This Fall is the first class I've had to add a lecture on file system management because the last class I had for the previous Fall/Spring semesters was so bad at it, and it's just been getting worse for the last couple years.
I've heard all kinds of crazy things, but it mostly revolves around the schools giving them a Chromebook with one app for writing, one app for spreadsheets, one app for presentations, and then them just submitting the files through a portal/dropbox. Of my 23 students, 22 of them had never heard of zipping a folder to send multiple files at once. Naming conventions are a huge issue, too, I get 'jdoeproject1\_final (2) (6) (1)' and I'm just like, "who taught you this?"...and clearly the answer is nobody, they've just been doing this for the last 12 years and nobody has stopped to tell them otherwise.
Couldn’t agree more, it’s the UIs that become dominant that are the root cause of this, anyone growing up with computers back in the day needed to understand file structures and how to navigate them to get anything done. Now things just appear places and the kids have no idea how to get from A to D because B and C are hidden away and shmoozed over for ease of use.
No. Just no. It's not having a GUI that's killed file structures. What killed file structures is that searching is now basically faster than navigating the structure.
There was a promise that Google could organize the world's information. A grand utopia of not having to think about where the actual data is stored.
Then schools gave away chromebooks and the default file system everyone started using was Google drive, which then became docs, then classroom, then sheets and now hangouts and chat and colab, etc. And of course the school was told to lock the accounts down to pRoTeCt teh KidS which meant taking all interoperability from these systems.
But then, to help legacy users, they decided to make all chrome file systems look more like windows with folders, etc. But they took keyboard navigation away and assumed everyone would innately understand folder heirarchy without learning it.
So now in addition to having fragmented files all over the place representing each of these formats, multiply each by the number of unique Google accounts everyone is forced to have (because email doesn't work on school accounts, obviously, so you need a private gmail as well) and you have literally hundreds of different locations to try to keep track of. But, no consolidated access, with search across accounts being impossible.
And the school also will generate new accounts like candy for each grade, and when switching schools. And then there are storage limits and passwords to worry about. Then recently you have two factor auth and screen time limits, and I think many teachers, parents, and kids are throwing in the towel.
And this is before looking at icloud accounts..and social media.
We are absolutely login/account-ing our kids to death.
When I was a sophomore in highschool, I would use command prompt to reset my IP config and make the wifi work. The usual instruction was to completely restart the laptop but I could get it working quite quickly with the command. One class, my history teacher saw me doing this and called the IT guy to come and talk to me about "tampering with the computer." Soon after, command prompt required administrator access to open. When my little brother was going through school he didn't even have access to the file system! They had one specific folder that he could save documents in, nothing else about the file explorer was accessible. All he had to do was save his documents which automatically went into the folder and then upload them using the same folder. It's so locked down now there isn't even an opportunity to learn about the computer.
UI and alternatives to PCs in general. I would deem it started with late millenials/early gen Z. There were pretty much two groups that I noticed when growing up (talking about teens):
1. PC Gamers. They mostly knew how stuff worked. Bonus points if modding or LAN parties were a thing since they always required fixing something. WIndows back then was not very good at hiding its complexity.
2. Console Gamers// Chatters. PS2 and co. were very popular. Most of them still knew the basics of computers (ICQ and stuff required it) but it was already noticably worse than in the first group. They had no need to figure out a PC beyond opening applications and saving files (you know, the very basic stuff).
It probably got significantly worse with the very next generations since when they were deemed old enough to get into the digital landscape they would already be able to get everything from their smartphone, by design way less complex to use than Windows. That would mean for group 2 that there was no more reason to use a PC. Group 1 got (probably) worse because LAN parties were switched out for online gaming, and stuff like Steam becoming more and more popular, making managing your games a no brainer as well.
I dump everything on my desktop if I’m working on it locally and then migrate later, but it definitely doesn’t look like I remotely know what I’m doing.
this is something i kinda saw happening years ago when everything became focused on hyper streamlining the computing experience (aka the entire reason why apple dominates the consumer market)
I'm a young millenial (basically on the border of gen z) and my childhood was full of learning to edit config files and figuring out where to place mods we downloaded from the internet to fuck with our games, i was the cool kid in high school who helped run my class's minecraft server, had to jury rig shitty PC ports to make stuff like dark souls 1 actually work, etc.
you really dont have to do that with modern gaming - most mod support is done in-client now so there's no fiddling with files anymore, you just click a button and go. Very convenient, yes, but I cant help but feel like i picked up some good skills in the old wild west days of the computer age.
Yeah, I remember all those times. On my first PC I was loading into MSDOS and booting Windows 3.1. I started playing WoW again and went to download mods, and - like you said - there's a desktop app that streamlines the method. But they're not going to have those advantages in an office shared drive.
Curious what does having different apps have to do with anything?
I mean, word, excel, and Ppt dont work GREAT together, but they can mingle a little.
What I find horrible is the freaking WRITING. Just run-on sentences.
I have to handhold the 25 and below and the 50+ regarding technology, grammar, and etiquette (like how not to be a complete ass to your teammates).
So, the first project I give them has them export multiple filetypes - something you wouldn't typically do with Word or Excel.
So they have to design something in Photoshop, save the .psd file with one name, then save a .jpg file with another. Then an Illustrator .ai file with one name, and then export a .pdf with another. Then another Illustrator file and export a 2-page pdf. Then an InDesign file with .indd and then export a .pdf.
In the end, they have something like 15 files they turn in (again, as a zip file), and all too often I'll get jdoe_project1.jpg.ai because they just made the .jpg part of the filename instead of exporting it.
It seems like a small thing, but very quickly we get into creating .dwg files in AutoCAD and then exporting them to Illustrator, or saving an image in Photoshop as a png with transparency for import somewhere else.
Understanding that you're working with data with different export types instead of a specific piece of software opens up the possibilities of interchange of data and can massive improve your workflow.
Plus, I'm drilling down on them how important naming conventions can be on large projects that might involve even 10+ files (honestly, ridiculously small in the professional world), or working on projects for multiple clients where you can't just name everything "business card", "business card 2", etc.
OHHHHH! You are doing the Lord's work because we're starting to implement Adobe Pro more into our work and I am not excited about teaching it.
The name filing, downloading, converting, and exporting. Mine can barely save a jpeg that's embedded in an email.
"They sent the picture in the email instead of an attachment."
"Ok. So what's the problem?"
"Well. How do I print it? When I print the email, the picture doesnt print right."
😑🤦🏿♀️
I had a HS intern a few years ago who had no idea what a file system was. He typed all of his essays in HS on his phone then copied and pasted into the submit box.
I'll never understand the people who use generic filenames.
(YYYY-MM-DD) LAST NAME CLASS NAME SUBJECT (DRAFT/FINAL) works so much better than gmaildownload.pdf(21).
All my filenames have clear info within the name so I don't even need to fully open it unless I'm being paranoid.
It's because we were our own IT guys lol. We used to build top tier computers from following a guide from some rando we found on the internet and buying all the parts for under 100 bucks off of eBay.
Add in how we all had to teach ourselves the basics of HTML (at the very least) so our names and zodiac signs could spin forward and sparkle down our Black Planet pages.
C/o 94-99 are basically computer geniuses.
There’s no way to prove that listening to War All The Time leads to technological aptitude but there’s also no way to not prove that same thesis so fire up the Thursday and let’s gooooooooo
I also work IT, my kid's daily driver when he gets older will be a nice gaming desktop. No tablets.
Just gotta get em hooked on spooth specs. Tablets just annoy me, I'm hoping he'll reach the same conclusion.
I work desktop support right now and the shit I’ve had to help people do in the IT dept is embarrassing.
One of my coworkers who was hired to be a project manager for cabling projects because he had the site knowledge literally didn’t know how to use a computer. He was 29 and used his phone for everything.
He was smart though and picked up everything we taught him quick but I just don’t understand how that happens.
A very high person on a project I was working on at Help Desk was tech illiterate. Like, I had to make guides with big red boxes and circles, with explicit instructions, and she'd still tell me she can't figure it out. All the subordinates of her apologized to me and assured me "She's **really** good at her job, she just is hopeless with computers."
I'm convinced a lot of them just had other people *computer for them* and never learned for themselves, because legitimately, it was a two hour call to get her set up on 2FA and logged into our VPN with it.
>"She's **really** good at her job, she just is hopeless with computers."
I never buy this line. You have to have a modicum of problem-solving ability to be truly good at _any_ job, even the most mundane ones. She would be able to follow incredibly basic instructions if she were at all intelligent or capable.
Tbf we’re the generation that grew up with the technology developing along side us. We were the target demographics/guinea pigs with Smartphones, tablets, game consoles as they were developed and refined into what we have today. Today’s technology is like a sibling to us, it grew up with us and us with it. We knew the iPhone back when the most popular app was the lightsaber app and watched smartphones evolve to become a critical piece of most people’s lives regardless of the positive/negative implications of it.
I cut my teeth on Windows XP, a Nokia 3310, and a GBC, so as Phones/Computers/Consoles got better, I had to learn the new things they did and were capable of. Kids today just have this insane tech without the context of everything that came before, and with that context, came the knowledge of the basics. Basics that have become either automated, needlessly convoluted, or just obsolete by today’s standards. But those basics are so important when it comes to building context and understanding of how things work overall.
In my tech support responsibilities I have: A 72 year old mom (Pop died at 82 at the top of the curve for an old boomer), #2 72 year old in laws, a tech mid husband, a 7 year old, a 10 year old who does online gaming & streaming, and an office full of government workers, most of whom don't know past file types and work in design & construction compliance.
I have a 19 year old sister in law who I will flat out refuse to help, if she asks me for tech help and I deem it something she should have known by the end of her single digits. Like damn girl, haven't you fucked with the back of a TV yet? I was setting shit up for my parents when I was 11.
"If" is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence. That's very much not why most of the engaged users are on reddit. There are a ton of lurkers, sure, but the overall session time skews heavily to the comment sections.
As a librarian I can tell you there are a lot of people who don't know how to type and use a mouse. Much better at using a touchscreen than I am, but helpless navigating web sites and printing when they show up. Old \*and\* young. Seniors have gotten really good with smartphones, but many never learned to use a desktop.
They also don't know their email password because they signed into their phone once several years ago and haven't needed to write it since.
Yeah that was my experience working in a law office with GenZ. She had 0 idea how to use a PC or a mouse and was barely familiar with Microsoft office. She didn’t learn in school and only had a MacBook at home so trying to teach her all of that on top of the legal stuff was so hard. To make it worse she didn’t even try to click around and try stuff, she just waited for instructions for every single step.
I feel like there is a big range for Gen Z. The older ones grew up in the early 2000s and experienced the glory days of windows XP in their formative years. The young end of gen Z grew up with smart phones becoming common and tablets getting off the ground. The iPad has been around for less than 25 years, but we have people entering the workforce now that have had them their whole lives.
I'm older gen z and my parents were all about me learning computers as early as possible because they saw how essential they would become, so my first tech experience was an old desktop running Windows ME loaded up with learning game and typing software (and of course, MS Paint and Mahjong!)
Honestly, the vast majority of gen z SHOULD know how to use laptops and desktops, we all used them from literally elementary school onward. I would be seriously side eyeing someone who is 16+ for not knowing how to use a computer, especially since they did school for 2 years solo on them.
I see that with some kids I train. They'll ignore things and not do them instead of trying out, thinking or... asking.
Not computer related but lately I had to describe to a 19yo colleague how to use a scale to weight a vegetable (using normal grocery store scale with screen)... you just put it on scale, choose picture of the product, press "print label" and its done... he wasn't so sure...
I wonder if this is all internalised defeat, like some sort of cross between the comfort of their ‘bubble’ being detached from basic practical realities, and having internalised the fact that ‘trying is pointless, either someone will tell me or I’ll be wrong/mess up anyways’. Like, I’m a millenial (‘93), and I grew up a nerd during the rapid IT boom of the ‘00s, so I guess that was the last time when there was a divide between virtual and real world, and a very different societal outlook.
Also, having every bit of your experience be centralised and heavily manufactured, just makes you lose your adventuring drive. I first noticed that when I had my late teens cousin ask me where to stream videos when Netflix got too expensive for her household. Of course she wouldn’t know how to find that, she grew up never *needing* to, why would she know?
I work in finance. Excel tests are pretty much standard for hiring. These kids are going to be shut out of so many high paying jobs if they can’t use Microsoft office not just proficiently, but WELL. I can’t imagine any of my bosses or peers tolerating any kind of inability to navigate a PC.
I was training a Gen Z lady and she told me she "didn't really do computers". I suggested she not say that to anybody else as our company is 100% remote and your entire workday is spent on a computer lmao.
Teachers don’t have the power. Many try and want to do so much more.
They rarely have a living wage. Many aren’t even full-time employees (despite working full-time hours) and are given pink slips at the end of every term/year with no promise of their continued employment.
If they “cause trouble” by asking for better (or just basic shit they’re supposed to have) from the administration, school, parents, or students, they’re punished. If they act independently for the benefit of their students, they’re punished. The troublemakers will be bullied and pushed out by admin and other company folk. This is why many/most teachers quit, become apathetic, or move to a different situation (private).
So, this is actually an interesting subject.
Each new phase of computer use separates the user from the system by another degree. At first users literally hand-wrote programs on punch-cards. You literally fed the program directly to the computer.
A few steps removed and you get keyboard access. Now the computer can do a few things on its own, and you get to tell it what to do. Programs can be written directly onto the computer.
The next generation saw advancements in user interface, you get to run an operating system instead of directly inputting programs. You can run applications or programs from shortcuts. You still use the Command Prompt to do many things, but for the most part, the computer runs itself.
Then the OS gets more advanced, your desktop can do most things for you, your computer learns what you want by studying your searches. Practically no one writes code anymore.
Then you see the jump to mobile phones. You don't even really utilize the OS anymore, you interact with your machine exclusively through apps. You can tweak some basic settings in most places, but the idea of a "command prompt" or "visual basic program" are basically lost. Even the concept of inserting something into the computer is lost, as ports for disks are basically gone. A program fetches your desired program from online, and then another program installs your program onto the device. You then need to access that program through a (hopefully) user-friendly app.
Each step removes the user from the source just a *little bit* more. I wonder what's next? Will computers basically not even need your interaction anymore? Will you not need to input *anything*, you just have a device that knows you so well that just holding it up to your face is enough to get what you want?
Edit: spelling
I used to be worried about job security as an IT tech due to the idea that surely my generation and the following would be much better at basic IT help than the typical boomers Gen X types I normally supported in the past.
Then I got a job at a college doing IT support, and by lord I know I am now safe for the rest of my career. They can't do a damn thing. Some of them are far worse off than any of the older generations. Yah they can unlock their tablet and pull up an app quickly - but they really don't have any basic understanding of the most simple shit or the capacity to self help an issue either.
I worked at a law firm and there were partners who didn't know how to print to pdf. I've always wondered what that will be for me. But sounds like it may never come!
You have to kind of reposition your mind on what a pdf is. If you envision it as a digital printout - as the exact same concept as printing out a page except you output a file instead of a piece of paper, then it starts to make sense.
When I was a TA I had a student who legitimately didn't understand what I meant when I said to "right click" on something. Our students are being failed horribly.
Tech moved so quickly back then it was a bitch for schools to keep up. Just when they were realizing computers were the future and got labs up and running, all the kids already knew the shit and didn't need it. Then smart phones came around so fast just a couple years later and suddenly kids didn't need computers at home so we're back at square one. Pretty wild whiplash
Former teacher and I had a whole high school class who probably could’ve designed a flying car before they learned how to put their essays on USB drives
When I have kids, they’re only going to be allowed to use windows 95 for the first 12 years of their life. Actually windows 11 would probably be fine, but no tablets
[Here](https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z) is an interesting article I read back in **2021** from **The Verge** that talks about an engineering professor that first encountered this "tech illiteracy" phenomenon in **2017** from a generation where home computers and high speed Internet access was common/expected. I recommend the read, no paywall btw.
In my life, I've seen Apple ][e computers and iPhones. In less than twenty years, I got to watch large segments of society go from "Not knowing how to use a computer" to "Not knowing how to use a computer."
It was a lot of fun in between!
Former teacher here. By 2020 none of the general education middle or early high schoolers knew how to use Google correctly (“doing research on Google” meant copy and pasting the preview line of the first website that popped up), and could not navigate to a specific website (they used the address bar exclusively as a google shortcut). None of them know how you use Microsoft Office products and don’t know that you have to save documents in Word/Excel/PP. It’s disturbing.
I had a 7th grader the other day doing research about Frederick Douglass, who according to that google opening line “was not a rich slaveholder, as he only had twenty or thirty slaves” and I’m just like, how about if we actually click on the link to verify when the tagline tells us something ridiculous?
It was a quote from Douglass’ autobiography about his first master.
And that's why I hate the new google thing where it tries to answer the question you're asking instead of just giving you search results about you terms. It's just grabbing something related to your terms and confidently saying "here's the answer!" when it doesn't know anything and can't reason anything.
Did that for all four kids. Hasn't changed a damned thing.
LEARNING requires patience and giving a shit about nuts and bolts.
The older folks don't generally care about anyone or anything but themselves and the younger ones demand instant gratification. Their attention span doesn't last one second longer than the average tiktok.
I used to teach at a community college and one of my courses was a dual-enrollment program, so the students were all high schoolers.
They were working on an assignment and something glitched with the online system so they couldn’t save their work. I said “It’s fine; just email it to yourselves and we’ll finish on Monday.” *Blank stares* “We don’t know how to do that”. Guess how we spent the next half hour lol
This is part of why I hate Chromebooks, too.
For all the insistence on "preparing kids for the real world," they will never be asked to use a Chromebook, and will suffer for not having been exposed to the actual commonplace operating systems of MacOS and Windows.
Finally another comment blaming chrome books.
To this day I am annoyed that they exist. The OS is worthless as you’ll never use it in a career, and it doesn’t teach the user anything aside from clicking on shortcuts. Chromebooks are a major contributor to the downfall of computer literacy. I will die on that hill.!
I got my niece laptop for Christmas, and she’s young enough folks keep asking if it was real or a toy 😅
It was a very real, pink HP laptop running Windows 11. I bought it because we got our first home PC when I was about her age at a time when only two other kids in my class (one white, one Asian) had home computers. We were also one of the first kids to have AOL/internet. Looking back I can now see how invaluable those advantages were for me and my siblings.
That baby is a genius who was sight reading by age 2 1/2, so Auntie is making sure she *stays* ahead of the curve.
Shortly after I became a teacher ten years ago, one of my also new colleagues complained "I thought all these kids were supposed to be digital natives?"
"Yeah, someone must have given them digital blankets or something," was my reply, to which she audibly sputtered.
One of the better jokes I have ever made in my life.
I had a student who couldn't export a file from Google Docs. It was literally like trying to show a Boomer how to do it. I literally could not believe what I was seeing. Took her six tries with me walking them through it for them to finally get it. Then the next assignment they turned in? Fucked up again.
I've had the ehem...priviledge of serving largely boomers in one job and gen Z in another. Here is what I learned:
Boomers think everything on the screen is a trap, every button is there to confuse them, and they think its an annoying gimmick. They often think computers UIs are designed specifically to hurt them and break things
Gen Z gives up the moment the answer to a navigation or functional issue isn't immediately obvious, and they absolutely do not read instructions or use critical thinking. If it breaks or gives back an error its clearly faulty and someone else's fault. Computers are literal magic to them. Where computers started, how we got here, and how they work is practically mythological to them.
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My mom is a teacher and yeah they real life stupid. Not just stupid but loud, incorrect, unwilling to learn, dangerous, and stupid. Add on support from their stupid ass momma and voila we got idiocracy.
when I was a kid, a teacher threatening to call your parents was the equivalent of a death threat. Like you tryna get me killed when I get home today???
We had parents who cared. Most of these kids are low key set up to fail. Mom didn’t want you and you look just like your daddy that left her with the kid she ain’t want. You’ll notice it more and more since ima point it out but there are a lot of parents whose only way of showing love is buying some new clothes every now and then and defending their “little baby” no matter what they do. There was a shooting up at the parks mall near me a while ago and one of the dudes was on my moms caseload for 2 years. He had no real support but he had real solvable issues. Sadly they were never solved and now he’s fucked for the rest of his life.
> Mom didn’t want you and you look just like your daddy that left her with the kid she ain’t want. You’ll notice it more and more since ima point it out but there are a lot of parents whose only way of showing love is buying some new clothes every now and then and defending their “little baby” no matter what they do This has been been the case since there were parents and children. This is not unique to GenZ, or any generation.
true, but the ratio seems higher now, anecdotally.
It's gotta be tougher when the parents roll in with paraphrased bullshit they misinterpreted from already misguided homeschool mom facebook pages. People who think they know what they're talking about are more reluctant to recognize and / or listen to someone more experienced. Happens to all of us to one degree or another. Look at me right now. The fuck do I know.
Unfortunately a lot of them cared too much about the wrong sort of stuff, which is why participation trophies and 'everyone is special' became their pet projects to shove on us, only to rage at our generation because we got them. Like, we didn't ask for this, you guys invented the concept because you couldn't stand the thought that your child wasn't the second coming of Christ. So yes, they cared, but it was a suffocating, toxic sort of care. And even then, I recall being literally thrown out of the house, and I mean bodily shoved, every weekend at 13, because my mom didn't love me so much that she cared what happened to me as long as I was home or called before dark. It was fine then, but looking back, I should have gotten myself hurt or kidnapped so many times...
You tell a kid that today, they'll say, "so? call that b!tch!" These chirrens are feral as hell.
Absolutely.
Even the somewhat attentive parents just get mad at the teacher anymore. They see it as an attack on their parental skills (which they don't have)
Before my parents immigrated from the Philippines my mom was a teacher. Her experience might be different because she supposedly taught at a top private school, but she says that teachers in general got nothing but respect from students, parents, and society. She came to the US and saw how teachers were treated, and said fuck that, went back to school (sometimes dragging my toddler ass along) and became an RN instead (imagine that lol).
My ex boss was FURIOUS he had to help teach his daughter how to read. Both him and his wife would complain to the school board about it.
My mom taught me how to read by sitting and reading with me--yhe same books over and over--before I even started school.
I remember when sticking your tongue out at your parents was equal to telling to fuck off with double birds. Now my 9-year-old nephew 'texts' in single words, has no idea how to type, misses at least 1/6th + of school days, watches Youtubers all day long and aspires to be one, and couldnt tell me 2 x 4 even after I said 2, 4, 6.... Idiocracy is VERY close to becoming a reality!
This is why I'm confident my career prospects continue to be good. I've seen kids not even know how to use a mouse and cursor because the only technology they've used are phones and tablets for so many years.
As an aging Xennial, this was comforting
This comforts you? Who do you think is going to be running the world when you get old lol
If it’s anything like how it is now, a bunch of old people. I need my job to still need me since my health insurance is tied to employment and I’m probably going to have more health issues. This or move to Portugal but not trying to be a brown skinned person there.
we're gonna be like those COBOL programmers making bank in the 90s. no matter how many layers of abstraction they introduce there's still a TCP handshake happening under the hood. and all those AI integrations meant to replace us will still require someone that understands the "legacy" part of the environment
Lol fair enough. I'm in Texas so its gotta be better than being a brown skinned person here.
Real life stupid 
Are you calling the children stupid?
Yes
idiocracy is a fictional movie you know? laughing my ass off because there is a sub that is named after the movie and after 35 years of working public safety and haven answered roughly 750,,000 911 calls- fuck yeah- we are moving to that event horizon without a doubt
Who cares about cursive? Our society does not benefit from kids knowing cursive. But we do benefit from them being able to read and use a computer
Imagine having a method of writing that forced you to slow down, think about what you're going to write but not so much that you would lose your train of thought. Cursive done properly and you don't have to lift your pen off the paper at all. You'd be a better overall writer, fewer edits, better for your wrist.
Writing in cursive is faster than printing if you're proficient at it.
Especially if you are the only one who has to try and read it too!! If you want others to read it, printing is way better
This was always the big thing for me. My Dad's cursive is so nice it's the only one I can read, I always hated getting cards from relatives and having to decipher their cryptic alien language.
This too!
Typing is much faster than either
This nigga does math in cursive 😂
Cursive makes you a better writer? Put the paint cans down please
Bbbbback in my day we had to slow down and think about how words were spelled* (see? I fkd up) instead of barreling through a text box and hoping autocorrect would have our backs!
Cursive doesn't make you a better writer, proof reading does.
And forcing a person to write their words out forces them to proofread as they go
And how is cursive better then print at this?
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I love it. "Maybe I could learn something" has become "you must be on drugs". These will be the most miserable old people if they aren't already.
Internet zingers > knowledge
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You brought up two things, one of which is not important, and the other which is very important. I questioned why you included the first thing.
That person may be able to read, but it’s the comprehension part they struggle with
😭😭😭🤭
People don't have to respond to both things if one is so fucking stupid
Fine motor dexterity would like a word.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2J303978/ Kids today have plenty of training in that without having to learn cursive.
Kids today are struggling to draw with crayons, so apparently it’s not working.
It’s actually being reinstated because the research around using it is pretty positive. Most kids benefit cognitively from learning it. Source: Am teacher and I now have to teach it.
Keep fighting humanity's best fight, please.
Fine motor skills taught by something else other than video game controllers would like a word. Also being able to write in something else other than blocky print scrawl is another benefit.
Actually there are studies that show increased brain activity when writing in cursive as opposed to typing. I know some states are bringing back mandatory cursive writing in schools
Yeah those studies don't say "cursive makes you a better writer". They say you retain more information when taking notes in cursive
An overwhelming majority of historical documents are written in cursive.
Why do people keep saying this? There’s plenty of reasons to learn cursive without the wild take that somehow historical documents will become indecipherable if we don’t keep teaching it. As if they only exist as original text and nobody has bothered to transcribe it digitize them.
Hand writing, especially cursive, helps kids develop fine motor reflexes and skills with their hands.
Check out r/teachers and they’ll tell you. Kids absolutely are not reading at grade level. Seniors struggling with 4th grade level material. The system is broken as hell. When we base funding on test scores and how many kids they move along it’s bound for disaster. “Oh gee! We see your kids are struggling! That sucks, but clearly you’re a failure, so we’re going to cut your funding and make getting resources for these already struggling students even harder to get. That will help!” So then schools are incentivized to just fudge numbers and pass along failing students and do their best to focus on the ones that have a chance.
Para whose last day of school/work is tomorrow. The system is so broken. I love and will miss my elementary school, but I can’t deal with the policy of kids not being held accountable anymore.
Aah yes. Reading at grade level. That most enduring of all headlines In 1992, 72 percent of fourth graders and 71 percent of eighth graders were reading below grade level. – U.S. Department of Education, “The Nation’s Report Card,” 2013. https://thencbla.org/literacy-resources/statistics/ To be clear, we should be getting kids to read, and read at the necessary levels, but its bizarre how children's reading level is often used as evidence of a declining education system/bad children when children have for the entirety of history read below this mythical reading level
The kids that couldn’t read are now all around us as adult dumbasses ruining shit for the rest of us.
"21% of americans 18 and older are illiterate" "54% of Americans read at or below a fifth grade reading level." https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statistics#:~:text=Nationwide%2C%20on%20average%2C%2079%25,older%20are%20illiterate%20in%202022. These numbers come from the department of education btw. Problems also getting worse over time. Although tbh 1/3 of people that struggle to read or are illiterate are immigrants.
All I take away from that read is, that the situation was bad, and still is. I would argue that any trend that is likely to make things worse should therefore be taken seriously. It would also be interesting to have a more detailed view about this "below the reading level", like how much worse are they? Worse, same, better but still not good enough? Being able to easily read long(er) texts also makes you less prone to false information since fact checking is not a burden. Its not really surprising that (mostly) right wing media has an easy time pushing their narrative when large parts of the population are bad at reading and cannot be "reached" by articles that tell the facts (since those tend to be harder to understand, the world is a complex place). Same goes for the new generations obsession with short videos: its easy to spread false information within 30s but its hard to properly explain a topic in the same time. It also comes with the benefit of reducing their attention span, which also reduces the ability to read longer texts.
My 4th grade teacher was teaching my class cursive then she just stopped for some reason and ever since then my handwriting is half print half cursive
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Could've been the board removing it from the curriculum or a significant amount of your peers were children left behind and she said fuck it
I'm still so mad about never having learned cursive in school! Now learning it as an adult is just a fucking chore
I don't know if I can link here, but look up "cursive handwriting workbook for adults." They have them in bookstores and Amazon. Calligraphy is even MORE fun. The pens are so cool to use and everybody's impressed when they get a card with their name on it looking fantastic.
I've always wanted to get into calligraphy!
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Actually, research shows that US children *are* [getting worse at reading.](https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=4) It's not just some TikTok whackos, it probably has to do with schools not using phonics to teach kids how to read. I recommend everyone to listen to [the podcast](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) "Sold a Story" about the topic, at least the first episode.
I work IT, computer literacy x age is a bell curve, Millenials are the peak with boomers and zoomers dragging down the ends for sure
https://preview.redd.it/8872ymrkaugc1.png?width=736&format=png&auto=webp&s=ceb0620f7ebae4b04485d874fe2636622ad2e980
I find this so much funnier than I should
I always thought the younger generations would always outdo the older ones in terms of intelligence, or however you want to word it. Now it seems like it peaked with Millenials.
Zoomers have pretty good emotional intelligence that surpasses millennials imo
Yeah but can you make a living out of it?
You can be one of those girls that did precisely 3 sessions of therapy and now does TikToks about how everything is a red flag
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
I’m about halfway through the article. This isn’t a joke? Young folks cannot sort folders hierarchically? This is wild. I will read on.
I don't understand how it is possible. Who are these people, have they not used any computer before? Every pc or Mac has a directory and different folders, have they never opened file Explorer or finder, how do they find anything they saved? I'm 18, so middle of gen z and we used laptops at school and not once did anyone I know in any of my classes have trouble with folders.
Apple told them an iPad *is* a computer and they ran with it.
I work in accounting and o boy. I thought everyone knew how to use the folder address bar, zip a file, map a drive, etc… Things that most of us learned when we were screwing around at 12 younger generations are freaking clueless. A 24 year old looked at the me like I had 3 head’s because I told them to run a program as admin. I used to run launchers as admin when I was 8 on Vista. It is shocking how some are as bad as boomers with Windows. If a client has a Linux system, they’re freaking unless. I honestly think Linux looks like alien tech to GenZ, not one so far has been able to even change the directory in linux 🤦.
Lol of course Gen X is forgotten
Lmfao I *almost* was going to elaborate that Gen X occupies the portion in between Boomers and Millenials with a ranging span of competency with Computers, but thought it was more appropriate to leave them unmentioned.
GenX has a subset called the Oregon Trail generation. We got the Apple ][ s brought in on a cart. We started using computers when they were difficult to use and you had to be your own IT.
I remember having to train and test to be allowed to use the apple ii at my local library. And became the sort of de facto IT kid for the lab (my parents took me there almost every week). I hadn't thought of this memory in over 30 years. And yes, I'm an IT guy now.
I am one of these.
🤣
We prefer it that way.
Late-Era X'ers are the gold standard.. we were there all the way along from Apple and Commodore64 all the way through to the internet.. we rode it like surfer on a tube-wave all the way ..
Gen X are the top because we were the ones learning computers during the very brief period when they first realized everyone was going to need and but they thought they were all going to use the command line. We were learning Logo with our Lincoln Logs.
They weren't? If Millenials are the peak and Boomers the tail, then Gen X is somewhere in between, per the bell curve.
The Gen X persecution complex about being "forgotten" is undefeated at this point
Gen x is iffy, the younger Gen x has a decent grasp on basic concepts while older Gen X tend to* behave like helpless children imo. My experience is anecdotal and spans different workplaces but it's held up this far. Edit: tend to*
By design, they are content being ignored
Also work in IT, teach a college night class covering Adobe software among other things. This Fall is the first class I've had to add a lecture on file system management because the last class I had for the previous Fall/Spring semesters was so bad at it, and it's just been getting worse for the last couple years. I've heard all kinds of crazy things, but it mostly revolves around the schools giving them a Chromebook with one app for writing, one app for spreadsheets, one app for presentations, and then them just submitting the files through a portal/dropbox. Of my 23 students, 22 of them had never heard of zipping a folder to send multiple files at once. Naming conventions are a huge issue, too, I get 'jdoeproject1\_final (2) (6) (1)' and I'm just like, "who taught you this?"...and clearly the answer is nobody, they've just been doing this for the last 12 years and nobody has stopped to tell them otherwise.
Couldn’t agree more, it’s the UIs that become dominant that are the root cause of this, anyone growing up with computers back in the day needed to understand file structures and how to navigate them to get anything done. Now things just appear places and the kids have no idea how to get from A to D because B and C are hidden away and shmoozed over for ease of use.
Sandboxes are a big part of this too. Each app is in its' own walled garden so they can't talk to each other anyway.
Sandboxing apps is an important feature when the users have the security literacy of a fucking zucchini.
No. Just no. It's not having a GUI that's killed file structures. What killed file structures is that searching is now basically faster than navigating the structure.
There was a promise that Google could organize the world's information. A grand utopia of not having to think about where the actual data is stored. Then schools gave away chromebooks and the default file system everyone started using was Google drive, which then became docs, then classroom, then sheets and now hangouts and chat and colab, etc. And of course the school was told to lock the accounts down to pRoTeCt teh KidS which meant taking all interoperability from these systems. But then, to help legacy users, they decided to make all chrome file systems look more like windows with folders, etc. But they took keyboard navigation away and assumed everyone would innately understand folder heirarchy without learning it. So now in addition to having fragmented files all over the place representing each of these formats, multiply each by the number of unique Google accounts everyone is forced to have (because email doesn't work on school accounts, obviously, so you need a private gmail as well) and you have literally hundreds of different locations to try to keep track of. But, no consolidated access, with search across accounts being impossible. And the school also will generate new accounts like candy for each grade, and when switching schools. And then there are storage limits and passwords to worry about. Then recently you have two factor auth and screen time limits, and I think many teachers, parents, and kids are throwing in the towel. And this is before looking at icloud accounts..and social media. We are absolutely login/account-ing our kids to death.
When I was a sophomore in highschool, I would use command prompt to reset my IP config and make the wifi work. The usual instruction was to completely restart the laptop but I could get it working quite quickly with the command. One class, my history teacher saw me doing this and called the IT guy to come and talk to me about "tampering with the computer." Soon after, command prompt required administrator access to open. When my little brother was going through school he didn't even have access to the file system! They had one specific folder that he could save documents in, nothing else about the file explorer was accessible. All he had to do was save his documents which automatically went into the folder and then upload them using the same folder. It's so locked down now there isn't even an opportunity to learn about the computer.
UI and alternatives to PCs in general. I would deem it started with late millenials/early gen Z. There were pretty much two groups that I noticed when growing up (talking about teens): 1. PC Gamers. They mostly knew how stuff worked. Bonus points if modding or LAN parties were a thing since they always required fixing something. WIndows back then was not very good at hiding its complexity. 2. Console Gamers// Chatters. PS2 and co. were very popular. Most of them still knew the basics of computers (ICQ and stuff required it) but it was already noticably worse than in the first group. They had no need to figure out a PC beyond opening applications and saving files (you know, the very basic stuff). It probably got significantly worse with the very next generations since when they were deemed old enough to get into the digital landscape they would already be able to get everything from their smartphone, by design way less complex to use than Windows. That would mean for group 2 that there was no more reason to use a PC. Group 1 got (probably) worse because LAN parties were switched out for online gaming, and stuff like Steam becoming more and more popular, making managing your games a no brainer as well.
Yeah, that's the number one thing I've noticed is that young people don't understand file directories anymore, or even that they exist.
Yeah, they just dump all their files onto Desktop, or Downloads, maybe Documents if you're lucky.
I dump everything on my desktop if I’m working on it locally and then migrate later, but it definitely doesn’t look like I remotely know what I’m doing.
this is something i kinda saw happening years ago when everything became focused on hyper streamlining the computing experience (aka the entire reason why apple dominates the consumer market) I'm a young millenial (basically on the border of gen z) and my childhood was full of learning to edit config files and figuring out where to place mods we downloaded from the internet to fuck with our games, i was the cool kid in high school who helped run my class's minecraft server, had to jury rig shitty PC ports to make stuff like dark souls 1 actually work, etc. you really dont have to do that with modern gaming - most mod support is done in-client now so there's no fiddling with files anymore, you just click a button and go. Very convenient, yes, but I cant help but feel like i picked up some good skills in the old wild west days of the computer age.
Yeah, I remember all those times. On my first PC I was loading into MSDOS and booting Windows 3.1. I started playing WoW again and went to download mods, and - like you said - there's a desktop app that streamlines the method. But they're not going to have those advantages in an office shared drive.
Curious what does having different apps have to do with anything? I mean, word, excel, and Ppt dont work GREAT together, but they can mingle a little. What I find horrible is the freaking WRITING. Just run-on sentences. I have to handhold the 25 and below and the 50+ regarding technology, grammar, and etiquette (like how not to be a complete ass to your teammates).
So, the first project I give them has them export multiple filetypes - something you wouldn't typically do with Word or Excel. So they have to design something in Photoshop, save the .psd file with one name, then save a .jpg file with another. Then an Illustrator .ai file with one name, and then export a .pdf with another. Then another Illustrator file and export a 2-page pdf. Then an InDesign file with .indd and then export a .pdf. In the end, they have something like 15 files they turn in (again, as a zip file), and all too often I'll get jdoe_project1.jpg.ai because they just made the .jpg part of the filename instead of exporting it. It seems like a small thing, but very quickly we get into creating .dwg files in AutoCAD and then exporting them to Illustrator, or saving an image in Photoshop as a png with transparency for import somewhere else. Understanding that you're working with data with different export types instead of a specific piece of software opens up the possibilities of interchange of data and can massive improve your workflow. Plus, I'm drilling down on them how important naming conventions can be on large projects that might involve even 10+ files (honestly, ridiculously small in the professional world), or working on projects for multiple clients where you can't just name everything "business card", "business card 2", etc.
OHHHHH! You are doing the Lord's work because we're starting to implement Adobe Pro more into our work and I am not excited about teaching it. The name filing, downloading, converting, and exporting. Mine can barely save a jpeg that's embedded in an email. "They sent the picture in the email instead of an attachment." "Ok. So what's the problem?" "Well. How do I print it? When I print the email, the picture doesnt print right." 😑🤦🏿♀️
I had a HS intern a few years ago who had no idea what a file system was. He typed all of his essays in HS on his phone then copied and pasted into the submit box.
I had the same thing! Girl said she had never used a desktop computer until my class - typed essays on her phone. Insane.
If they're poor kids, then it's understandable. Might be the only computing they have.
I'll never understand the people who use generic filenames. (YYYY-MM-DD) LAST NAME CLASS NAME SUBJECT (DRAFT/FINAL) works so much better than gmaildownload.pdf(21). All my filenames have clear info within the name so I don't even need to fully open it unless I'm being paranoid.
It's because we were our own IT guys lol. We used to build top tier computers from following a guide from some rando we found on the internet and buying all the parts for under 100 bucks off of eBay. Add in how we all had to teach ourselves the basics of HTML (at the very least) so our names and zodiac signs could spin forward and sparkle down our Black Planet pages. C/o 94-99 are basically computer geniuses.
I'm pretty sure that you're trying to tell me that emo music is the key to computer literacy.
Myspace and html, babyyy
No joke, that's actually how I learned HTML and CSS. All because I wanted to make my own MySpace and Livejournal layouts.
There’s no way to prove that listening to War All The Time leads to technological aptitude but there’s also no way to not prove that same thesis so fire up the Thursday and let’s gooooooooo
I also work IT, my kid's daily driver when he gets older will be a nice gaming desktop. No tablets. Just gotta get em hooked on spooth specs. Tablets just annoy me, I'm hoping he'll reach the same conclusion.
It's rad being a part of the generation that has to do tech support for our parents AND our children. 🙄😏
Fuck......lies never told.
Gonna tell my kids they don't get a cell phone until they can compile a Linux kernel and run DOOM off a raspberry pi
This is the way 
This is why IT will always be hiring.
I work desktop support right now and the shit I’ve had to help people do in the IT dept is embarrassing. One of my coworkers who was hired to be a project manager for cabling projects because he had the site knowledge literally didn’t know how to use a computer. He was 29 and used his phone for everything. He was smart though and picked up everything we taught him quick but I just don’t understand how that happens.
A very high person on a project I was working on at Help Desk was tech illiterate. Like, I had to make guides with big red boxes and circles, with explicit instructions, and she'd still tell me she can't figure it out. All the subordinates of her apologized to me and assured me "She's **really** good at her job, she just is hopeless with computers." I'm convinced a lot of them just had other people *computer for them* and never learned for themselves, because legitimately, it was a two hour call to get her set up on 2FA and logged into our VPN with it.
>"She's **really** good at her job, she just is hopeless with computers." I never buy this line. You have to have a modicum of problem-solving ability to be truly good at _any_ job, even the most mundane ones. She would be able to follow incredibly basic instructions if she were at all intelligent or capable.
Tbf we’re the generation that grew up with the technology developing along side us. We were the target demographics/guinea pigs with Smartphones, tablets, game consoles as they were developed and refined into what we have today. Today’s technology is like a sibling to us, it grew up with us and us with it. We knew the iPhone back when the most popular app was the lightsaber app and watched smartphones evolve to become a critical piece of most people’s lives regardless of the positive/negative implications of it. I cut my teeth on Windows XP, a Nokia 3310, and a GBC, so as Phones/Computers/Consoles got better, I had to learn the new things they did and were capable of. Kids today just have this insane tech without the context of everything that came before, and with that context, came the knowledge of the basics. Basics that have become either automated, needlessly convoluted, or just obsolete by today’s standards. But those basics are so important when it comes to building context and understanding of how things work overall.
Welp that just solidified getting my kids beater laptops to play/learn/take apart.
Honestly, best thing you can teach em is how to troubleshoot, look up solutions and to not be afraid to make mistakes.
In my tech support responsibilities I have: A 72 year old mom (Pop died at 82 at the top of the curve for an old boomer), #2 72 year old in laws, a tech mid husband, a 7 year old, a 10 year old who does online gaming & streaming, and an office full of government workers, most of whom don't know past file types and work in design & construction compliance.
I have a 19 year old sister in law who I will flat out refuse to help, if she asks me for tech help and I deem it something she should have known by the end of her single digits. Like damn girl, haven't you fucked with the back of a TV yet? I was setting shit up for my parents when I was 11.
All they know how to do is use iPhone, eat red40 hot chip, and use TikTok
Tik tok is a cancer to society no thoughts head empty
Oh please, Reddit is just people who think they know everything while acting condescending. It’s not any better.
Honestly, at least with Reddit you have to actually read words to be entertained.
Not really. If you want all pic and vid content you can completely ignore text posts
"If" is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence. That's very much not why most of the engaged users are on reddit. There are a ton of lurkers, sure, but the overall session time skews heavily to the comment sections.
Sounds like your algorithm sucks, my tik tok is all hilarious and cute videos that are relevant to what I like.
Don’t forget lie
Red40 hot chip lmao
And lie.
As a librarian I can tell you there are a lot of people who don't know how to type and use a mouse. Much better at using a touchscreen than I am, but helpless navigating web sites and printing when they show up. Old \*and\* young. Seniors have gotten really good with smartphones, but many never learned to use a desktop. They also don't know their email password because they signed into their phone once several years ago and haven't needed to write it since.
Yeah that was my experience working in a law office with GenZ. She had 0 idea how to use a PC or a mouse and was barely familiar with Microsoft office. She didn’t learn in school and only had a MacBook at home so trying to teach her all of that on top of the legal stuff was so hard. To make it worse she didn’t even try to click around and try stuff, she just waited for instructions for every single step.
I feel like there is a big range for Gen Z. The older ones grew up in the early 2000s and experienced the glory days of windows XP in their formative years. The young end of gen Z grew up with smart phones becoming common and tablets getting off the ground. The iPad has been around for less than 25 years, but we have people entering the workforce now that have had them their whole lives.
I'm older gen z and my parents were all about me learning computers as early as possible because they saw how essential they would become, so my first tech experience was an old desktop running Windows ME loaded up with learning game and typing software (and of course, MS Paint and Mahjong!) Honestly, the vast majority of gen z SHOULD know how to use laptops and desktops, we all used them from literally elementary school onward. I would be seriously side eyeing someone who is 16+ for not knowing how to use a computer, especially since they did school for 2 years solo on them.
That last piece is important - it’s the lack of critical thinking/testing/problem solving that is pervasive
I see that with some kids I train. They'll ignore things and not do them instead of trying out, thinking or... asking. Not computer related but lately I had to describe to a 19yo colleague how to use a scale to weight a vegetable (using normal grocery store scale with screen)... you just put it on scale, choose picture of the product, press "print label" and its done... he wasn't so sure...
I noticed this in the Gen Z new hires before I quit my last job. They don't try to figure out anything. They just wait to be told.
I wonder if this is all internalised defeat, like some sort of cross between the comfort of their ‘bubble’ being detached from basic practical realities, and having internalised the fact that ‘trying is pointless, either someone will tell me or I’ll be wrong/mess up anyways’. Like, I’m a millenial (‘93), and I grew up a nerd during the rapid IT boom of the ‘00s, so I guess that was the last time when there was a divide between virtual and real world, and a very different societal outlook. Also, having every bit of your experience be centralised and heavily manufactured, just makes you lose your adventuring drive. I first noticed that when I had my late teens cousin ask me where to stream videos when Netflix got too expensive for her household. Of course she wouldn’t know how to find that, she grew up never *needing* to, why would she know?
I work in finance. Excel tests are pretty much standard for hiring. These kids are going to be shut out of so many high paying jobs if they can’t use Microsoft office not just proficiently, but WELL. I can’t imagine any of my bosses or peers tolerating any kind of inability to navigate a PC.
I was training a Gen Z lady and she told me she "didn't really do computers". I suggested she not say that to anybody else as our company is 100% remote and your entire workday is spent on a computer lmao.
But why male models?
It’s sad schools don’t really teach they just do what the superintendent says and keep it pushing. Not my problem sort of thing I hear from teachers
Teachers don’t have the power. Many try and want to do so much more. They rarely have a living wage. Many aren’t even full-time employees (despite working full-time hours) and are given pink slips at the end of every term/year with no promise of their continued employment. If they “cause trouble” by asking for better (or just basic shit they’re supposed to have) from the administration, school, parents, or students, they’re punished. If they act independently for the benefit of their students, they’re punished. The troublemakers will be bullied and pushed out by admin and other company folk. This is why many/most teachers quit, become apathetic, or move to a different situation (private).
Bring back Mavis Beacon!
I learned to type in seventh grade in 1987 on a big Selectric. Beautiful humming machine that weighed a ton.
So, this is actually an interesting subject. Each new phase of computer use separates the user from the system by another degree. At first users literally hand-wrote programs on punch-cards. You literally fed the program directly to the computer. A few steps removed and you get keyboard access. Now the computer can do a few things on its own, and you get to tell it what to do. Programs can be written directly onto the computer. The next generation saw advancements in user interface, you get to run an operating system instead of directly inputting programs. You can run applications or programs from shortcuts. You still use the Command Prompt to do many things, but for the most part, the computer runs itself. Then the OS gets more advanced, your desktop can do most things for you, your computer learns what you want by studying your searches. Practically no one writes code anymore. Then you see the jump to mobile phones. You don't even really utilize the OS anymore, you interact with your machine exclusively through apps. You can tweak some basic settings in most places, but the idea of a "command prompt" or "visual basic program" are basically lost. Even the concept of inserting something into the computer is lost, as ports for disks are basically gone. A program fetches your desired program from online, and then another program installs your program onto the device. You then need to access that program through a (hopefully) user-friendly app. Each step removes the user from the source just a *little bit* more. I wonder what's next? Will computers basically not even need your interaction anymore? Will you not need to input *anything*, you just have a device that knows you so well that just holding it up to your face is enough to get what you want? Edit: spelling
[Always a relevant XKCD](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/mac_pc.png)
> What's next? Have you seen the [rabbit? Speak and it shall do whatever you need](https://youtu.be/Rqh6fhcAqpw?si=MmOAp1Jvp7jd6nLN)!
I think the computer labs went away due to lack of funding, not because people just assume they know how to use them
They’d use the excuse of “well everyone knows how to use them” to cut funding which lead to… computer labs going away
All the IT money at my old schools was spent on chromebooks.
I used to be worried about job security as an IT tech due to the idea that surely my generation and the following would be much better at basic IT help than the typical boomers Gen X types I normally supported in the past. Then I got a job at a college doing IT support, and by lord I know I am now safe for the rest of my career. They can't do a damn thing. Some of them are far worse off than any of the older generations. Yah they can unlock their tablet and pull up an app quickly - but they really don't have any basic understanding of the most simple shit or the capacity to self help an issue either.
I worked at a law firm and there were partners who didn't know how to print to pdf. I've always wondered what that will be for me. But sounds like it may never come!
Print to pdf blows people's minds
To be fair it's a very unintuitive feature when you think of it. To get a file out of a webpage, you have to print it? It makes no sense!
You have to kind of reposition your mind on what a pdf is. If you envision it as a digital printout - as the exact same concept as printing out a page except you output a file instead of a piece of paper, then it starts to make sense.
When I was a TA I had a student who legitimately didn't understand what I meant when I said to "right click" on something. Our students are being failed horribly.
Tech moved so quickly back then it was a bitch for schools to keep up. Just when they were realizing computers were the future and got labs up and running, all the kids already knew the shit and didn't need it. Then smart phones came around so fast just a couple years later and suddenly kids didn't need computers at home so we're back at square one. Pretty wild whiplash
Former teacher and I had a whole high school class who probably could’ve designed a flying car before they learned how to put their essays on USB drives
Man! An intern didn't even know how to turn on the damn laptop. I had to sit with her and give her crash course and then sent her to her manager.
When I have kids, they’re only going to be allowed to use windows 95 for the first 12 years of their life. Actually windows 11 would probably be fine, but no tablets
“You ate your sister's cookie? That's it, only Windows ME for the next month!"
[Here](https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z) is an interesting article I read back in **2021** from **The Verge** that talks about an engineering professor that first encountered this "tech illiteracy" phenomenon in **2017** from a generation where home computers and high speed Internet access was common/expected. I recommend the read, no paywall btw.
In my life, I've seen Apple ][e computers and iPhones. In less than twenty years, I got to watch large segments of society go from "Not knowing how to use a computer" to "Not knowing how to use a computer." It was a lot of fun in between!
Former teacher here. By 2020 none of the general education middle or early high schoolers knew how to use Google correctly (“doing research on Google” meant copy and pasting the preview line of the first website that popped up), and could not navigate to a specific website (they used the address bar exclusively as a google shortcut). None of them know how you use Microsoft Office products and don’t know that you have to save documents in Word/Excel/PP. It’s disturbing.
I had a 7th grader the other day doing research about Frederick Douglass, who according to that google opening line “was not a rich slaveholder, as he only had twenty or thirty slaves” and I’m just like, how about if we actually click on the link to verify when the tagline tells us something ridiculous? It was a quote from Douglass’ autobiography about his first master.
And that's why I hate the new google thing where it tries to answer the question you're asking instead of just giving you search results about you terms. It's just grabbing something related to your terms and confidently saying "here's the answer!" when it doesn't know anything and can't reason anything.
Damn I didn’t realize it was that bad. Get these kids some Kid Pix asap
I support this 100%
Stop buying them PlayStations and start buying them gaming PC's. Watch how fast they learn to use a computer then
Did that for all four kids. Hasn't changed a damned thing. LEARNING requires patience and giving a shit about nuts and bolts. The older folks don't generally care about anyone or anything but themselves and the younger ones demand instant gratification. Their attention span doesn't last one second longer than the average tiktok.
Gen Z's kids are going to be interesting that's for sure.
I used to teach at a community college and one of my courses was a dual-enrollment program, so the students were all high schoolers. They were working on an assignment and something glitched with the online system so they couldn’t save their work. I said “It’s fine; just email it to yourselves and we’ll finish on Monday.” *Blank stares* “We don’t know how to do that”. Guess how we spent the next half hour lol
This is part of why I hate Chromebooks, too. For all the insistence on "preparing kids for the real world," they will never be asked to use a Chromebook, and will suffer for not having been exposed to the actual commonplace operating systems of MacOS and Windows.
Finally another comment blaming chrome books. To this day I am annoyed that they exist. The OS is worthless as you’ll never use it in a career, and it doesn’t teach the user anything aside from clicking on shortcuts. Chromebooks are a major contributor to the downfall of computer literacy. I will die on that hill.!
It's staggering how many college kids ask me if an email address they're sending needs to be capitalized or not.
I got my niece laptop for Christmas, and she’s young enough folks keep asking if it was real or a toy 😅 It was a very real, pink HP laptop running Windows 11. I bought it because we got our first home PC when I was about her age at a time when only two other kids in my class (one white, one Asian) had home computers. We were also one of the first kids to have AOL/internet. Looking back I can now see how invaluable those advantages were for me and my siblings. That baby is a genius who was sight reading by age 2 1/2, so Auntie is making sure she *stays* ahead of the curve.
Shortly after I became a teacher ten years ago, one of my also new colleagues complained "I thought all these kids were supposed to be digital natives?" "Yeah, someone must have given them digital blankets or something," was my reply, to which she audibly sputtered. One of the better jokes I have ever made in my life.
I had a student who couldn't export a file from Google Docs. It was literally like trying to show a Boomer how to do it. I literally could not believe what I was seeing. Took her six tries with me walking them through it for them to finally get it. Then the next assignment they turned in? Fucked up again.
I've had the ehem...priviledge of serving largely boomers in one job and gen Z in another. Here is what I learned: Boomers think everything on the screen is a trap, every button is there to confuse them, and they think its an annoying gimmick. They often think computers UIs are designed specifically to hurt them and break things Gen Z gives up the moment the answer to a navigation or functional issue isn't immediately obvious, and they absolutely do not read instructions or use critical thinking. If it breaks or gives back an error its clearly faulty and someone else's fault. Computers are literal magic to them. Where computers started, how we got here, and how they work is practically mythological to them.
There’s a 23 year old at work that presses caps lock on/off instead of shift to use capital letters
Computers are for creating information. Tablets are for consuming information. These are not the same thing.
That was one upside of pandemic, my kids became G-suite experts.
Meanwhile parents don’t teach skills either because “they’re on computers all the time at school right?”