Snide Reply

Category: Social Commentary

  • The Signs of Success

    The Signs of Success

    The street I live on is lined with black and gold signs—the school colors of the nearby high school—displayed proudly in front of homes with graduating seniors.

    Beyond graduation announcements, several signs highlight the next educational step:

    Kids heading to DePaul, Northwestern, University of Illinois, and a handful of other Big Ten universities.

    The most coveted names—Harvard, Yale, University of Chicago—pop up now and then.

    It’s the season of pride—pride in someone else’s accomplishments: our children’s.

    What you don’t see:

    “College of DuPage Bound” signs.

    Attending community college, while financially wise, doesn’t seem sign-worthy.

    Facebook Feeds of Pride

    Facebook is even more saturated with parental pride.

    I don’t use it as much these days. Instead of seeing updates from my friends, I was seeing what their kids were doing—and they were all succeeding in the ways society measures success.

    Of course, parents should be proud of their children.

    But all this pride production comes at a steep cost.

    Success Beyond the Signs

    My kids are amazing—though neither of them went to Brown.

    They’ve achieved things that largely go unnoticed.

    High school wasn’t hard for my son.

    But academic success was—thanks in large part to ADHD.

    He could match the top students on tests, but couldn’t remember to bring home, do, return, or turn in assignments.

    His behavior, not his intelligence, kept him from being recognized.

    He’s a talented musician, too—drums at age three, later guitar and bass.

    But his school had few opportunities for someone whose music fits better in a mosh pit than a music hall.

    Following high school, he found a job where his inability to sit still was an advantage. He worked hard and was able to buy a house in his twenties. Not a condo—a drummer needs a basement, after all.

    My Daughter: Persistence Grapples With Emotional Health

    My daughter’s achievements are equally impressive.

    She was driven from the start. I remember one day in grade school:

    “I failed, Mom,” she said.

    I was surprised—she never failed anything in school. I asked about her grade.

    “I failed,” she repeated.

    “It doesn’t matter! I failed!”

    Then it dawned on me.

    “Honey, did you fail—or did you fail to get the grade you wanted?” She nodded. I asked what grade she had received, expecting a B, maybe a C.

    “I got an A,” she cried.

    “What on earth grade did you want?” I practically shouted.

    “I wanted an A+,” she wailed.“I failed, Mom,” she said, visibly upset.

    But high school hit differently.

    She took honors English and Social Studies. She was on the accelerated math track, and a cheerleader.

    Her days were packed—practice, dinner, then homework until she fell asleep with her head on her book, then woke to finish at 2 a.m.

    By sophomore year, she broke—physically and mentally.

    School attendance became impossible. Then, everything but sleep became impossible.

    Eventually, with an IEP and a transfer to virtual school, she graduated.

    Despite dealing with anxiety disorder, OCD, and major depressive disorder, she persevered.

    She’s been working since 16, is now 22, and already planning her retirement with a financial advisor.

    What Gets Recognition?

    I pass by my kids’ old high school every day on my way to work.

    The sign out front rotates between celebrating the school’s state ranking and its students’ academic and athletic successes.

    At the schools where I teach robotics and STEM, the cultural and economic realities are vastly different—but the emphasis on achievement is just as strong.

    Test scores are posted on bulletin boards—but only the high ones.

    Perfect attendance gets stars. A single sick day makes perfection impossible.

    Rethinking What We Celebrate

    Achievement is deeply personal, yet we’ve made it a universal, quantifiable metric:

    • Get A’s
    • Win awards
    • Come in first
    • Earn scholarships
    • Get into “the best” college

    But what if we celebrated something else?

    I’m not talking about the “everyone is a winner” trophy—students know that’s a crock.

    They know what gets real recognition.

    It’s not that they aren’t achieving amazing things.

    It’s that the amazing things they do aren’t the ones we put on signs.

  • Old People Know Things, Too

    Old People Know Things, Too

    I retired from full-time work in 2024. At that time, I was one of the oldest people employed by the organization. I didn’t want to retire, but things transpired as things do, and I stopped working full-time.

    Of course, I used numerous technologies throughout my career—Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook, and more. I’m familiar enough with them to appreciate Masood Boomgaard’s “F*** PowerPoint” video. In my current part-time job, I take attendance and enter my timesheets using apps on my phone.

    I’ve also used technology extensively in my personal life. I bought my first computer—a Mac Plus with a whopping 1 megabyte of RAM—in 1989. Now, there are more Apple devices in my home than there are people. Most of the legacy Macs are laptops, but there’s also an iPod or two, as well as a few iPads past their prime. Everything still works.

    Devices currently in use include two MacBook Airs, two iPhones, and a new iPad—a replacement for the last one, which was itself a replacement for the first. The newest iPad is huge compared to the rest—my only concession to needing a bigger, easier-to-read screen.

    I do everything on my devices. All my banking is online; I don’t even remember the last time I wrote a check. If I need one, I borrow one from my husband. I use Excel to comparison-shop everything from kitchen remodeling to deciding which Medicare supplement plan to buy.

    News? I get it online.

    Email? Available on my iPhone, Mac, and iPad.

    YouTube? iPhone, iPad, and Fire TV.

    Front door lock? Biometric.

    Doorbell? Has a camera.

    Furnace? I can change the temperature without getting out of bed.

    Driving? GPS, of course.

    But I don’t stop at the typical uses.

    Knitting? Knit Companion on the iPad.

    Home cleaning? Home Routines.

    Motivation? Finch.

    House training the dog? Puddle and Pile.

    If there’s an app for it, I’m on it.

    Many folks younger than me—especially Millennials and Zoomers—refuse to believe anyone born before them can use contemporary technology.

    It’s really starting to piss me off.

    Recently, I needed to enter a verification code that was texted to my iPhone. As I was about to automatically enter the code (a very nice feature, IMHO), a younger person leaned over my shoulder to show me how to do what I was just about to do. I, perhaps a little too snippily, said, “I know,” and let the phone do its thing.

    Because said person routinely shows her mother how to use technology, she assumed I would need a personal IT manager as well.

    It’s almost comically common for those younger than Boomers to believe we’re technological dinosaurs without the desire or mental capacity to learn anything—anything—new. There’s a witty Boomer response: I taught you how to use a spoon.

    The idea that Boomers are stupid, lazy, and proud of our lack of tech savvy simply isn’t true. We use smartphones, stream entertainment, shop and bank online, brag about our kids on Facebook, and catch up on the news. Some of us even know how to get our stupid routers to stop acting stupid. Most of us rely on technology to the point that we panic when the internet goes down.

    I was born before personal computers were a thing. I learned to write with a crayon. I graduated to pencils and pens by middle school and learned to type on a manual typewriter in high school. My secret crush is the IBM Selectric. IYKYK.

    In college, I wrote papers on a word-processing typewriter; the screen previewed about half a sentence at a time before the letters were typed onto the paper.

    I encountered business computing in a form my kids would recognize early in my career. Email, word processing, databases, and financial software were accessed through a terminal.

    The equipment and applications became more advanced as the years went on. Currently, I’m writing this post at my dining room table on a MacBook Air with a modest 8 GB of RAM. My iPhone and iPad are across the room. Everything is connected to 5G Wi-Fi. Clearly, this old person can use technology—despite being born when engineers used slide rules.

    Whippersnappers boast that they’re good at technology because they were born using it. Consider, though, that many haven’t upgraded their skills as each app iteration is released—they haven’t had to. At this point, nothing is new to them; it’s just improved.

    Boomers have been learning and adapting to technological change since childhood. Sure, by the time we reach our 50s, we may be a little tired of having to adapt—but we do it. We do it to stay current, to avoid becoming the dinosaurs we’re accused of being. Put that in your latte and drink it, Millennial.

    I taught my children much more than how to use a spoon. They cook (well, one of them does), clean, say please and thank you, know how to fold a fitted sheet (though they don’t do it), and only say “Can I go with?” to annoy me. They still call me when they don’t know how to do something, including deciphering the secret Boomer code (aka cursive) I use to write down recipes.

    If I know any actual Technological Boomer Dinosaurs, it’s my husband. He thinks technology hates him and only him. In his defense, he was born at the beginning of our cohort; I was born twelve years later—enough to make us seem like we’re from different generations. His rock stars were The Beatles; mine were Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.

    Recently, though, he started reviewing every movie ever made (or something like that—it’s a lot of movies) and publishing them on Substack. Without assistance. This morning, we had a conversation about open rates and views.

    Thanks to Mike Kalecki for this post’s title.

    Copyright Janice M. Lindegard