My view out the cabin window… communicating – personal contact or text?

The only sound heard in the classroom was the lingering crack of the ruler as it hit my knuckles. My teacher continued to stand over me, arms folded across her chest with the ruler poised to to strike again. For me just another day in our fifth grade penmanship class. An entire year of making ovals, jagged lines and letters to match those printed at the top of the page with any intentional deviations dealt with swiftly and at times painfully.

Sitting here almost 60 years later I wonder what are schools are now doing to teach our children how to write legibly. I am hearing more and more that computers are being introduced in schools to our children even in the first grade, and I wonder if learning to write legibly is even emphasized anymore. I mean when was the last time we had our children or grandchildren write a letter to their grandparents? For that matter when was the last time ( you ) wrote a letter?

Communications in the year 2015 is now all about email or texting, with even the casual phone call now being supplanted with the, more impersonal, text message. I think our current methods of staying in contact with friends has suffered with the loss of that personal contact. We are being forced more and more to hurry our encounters and thus never truly developing any close personal bond.

Yes I am an old curmudgeon that longs for the days of the ‘Bakelite’ eight pound house phone and the millions of pay phones scattered throughout our daily lives. I believe this is because back then because we invested more time in making that phone call but we had more empathy for people when we did speak with. Today we do not have to wait to find a pay phone to call someone, so today more often than not treat phone calls as distractions from something we consider more important.

Investing the time and effort of finding and using pay phones
and that old home phone land line made our conversations seem more important.
Today that text and cell phone, for the most part, make any call just another distraction,
and consider this…we never heard about a pay phone killing anyone like today
when drivers read or write text messages while driving.