My Ten on Tuesday post this week mentioned that one of the things I remember about elementary school was sending my first email. This apparently made a few of you feel ancient. I apologize. You shouldn’t. I bet you didn’t realize that the first email was sent in 1971. Yes, just 2 years after Sesame Street debuted and Cookie Monster was smoking his pipe during “Monsterpiece Theater,” the first email was zipping along the information superhighway. It probably was not much of a superhighway then, though. I imagine it was more like a country road or maybe maybe a suburban neighborhood street…in a gated community.
When I sent my first email in 4th grade, it was part of a project with the gifted & talented class. I didn’t know what email was, nor do I think the teacher even called it email. All I recall is that I was instructed to write a letter on the computer to an assigned “buddy” at the other elementary school in our district. The teacher told us the message would go through the computer to the student at the other school. So yeah, I “emailed” in 4th grade. However, my family didn’t get a modem until midway through high school. I remember around freshman year in high school when I kept begging for my parents to get the internet. I truly thought the internet was a piece of software. I remember going to Best Buy and looking all around the software section for a program called “the internet.” Wow. That’s embarrassing to admit, especially since I now work for an IT company.
I don’t know how to tie this back in, so please excuse the abrupt shift back to the topic of Sesame Street. This morning I read this article on CNN, and I’m interested to hear everyone’s thoughts on it. Personally, I think the “adults only” comment is ridiculous, and I’d love to buy the set to show to my children some day. I think things can get too censored and PC and it just becomes flat-out ridiculous.
i went to kindergarten in 1968. i was always bitter that i was “too old” for sesame street, or that our tv didn’t pick up the pbs station very well. as a babysitter, i used to LOVE watching sesame street with the kids, and was a HUGE fan of the muppet show. what i loved about all things muppet was their ability to be educational and yet engaging. as much for parents as for little ones.
this is what really irked me about barney. i am proud to say i raised my kids in a no-barney zone when he was ALL the rage. i thought the show condescending and banal. i would not subject my kids to that.
i think i cried the day jim henson died. such a loss of creativity and genius, but i’m glad to see his legacy lives on.
i’m sad to see all of our culture get so powerwashed. we’re all so wary of saying something that will be misinterpreted or hurt someone’s feelings. yeah cookie monster smoked. and that’s why kids have parents. so they can tell their kids not only is it inappropriate to smoke pipes, but it’s not a good idea to eat them, either.
I love the muppets too, and I agree with you about Barney. Blech.
Powerwashed…what a good word to describe our culture. I will have to borrow that from time to time.
We have the Sesame Street DVDs and saw that message! Childhood definitely seems like an overly-careful place now compared to when we were kids. If I tried to raise my kid the way I was raised someone would be able to call me in for neglect, probably – and I was very far from neglected! I just had some freedom and there wasn’t so much fear.
Haha, I love that you have the DVDs. We want them too!
We want to show them to our children (hopefully they’d be interested in watching). We’d probably be considered bad parents for “letting” our kids watch it, but oh well! I watched it, and I think I turned out just fine.
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