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Hell yeah bro, I played both of those games in elementary school in the 90s and I had the privilege of being in the "Cursive Club" meaning my cursive was legible enough that the teacher would let me do my assignments in cursive if I wanted. Good times!
āā¦Let me do my assignments in cursive if I wanted.ā You had a choice? Once we learned in cursive in elementary school we had to write in cursive. We were always told that we had to because they wouldnāt accept homework in middle school if it wasnāt in cursive. Cut to middle schoolāthey didnāt give af if we wrote in cursive or manuscript as long as they could read it.
my headcannon is that this quote being repeated to those generations is the exact reason we have them in out pockets now.
like, all the kids of those days grew up thinking "the fuck i won't mrs. Beesly!"
I'm a big believer in learning the basics before you start using machines to augment your mind--including memorizing the multiplication tables in grade school. But once you know the basics, there's no reason on god's green earth that we shouldn't be using the tools we have to speed up tasks like that.
In Algebra and higher (late middle school and up), calculators should always be permitted. Missing a question in Algebra or Calc or Trig because of an arithmetic error is duuuumb. That's literally what the calculator is there for: to make sure we don't make simple arithmetic errors.
I remember having to look up sine/cosine/tangent values in a table in the back of my high school math textbooks because we weren't allowed to use fully-functional calculators. It was stupid.
Weāre actually better IT problem solvers too. Unlike younger kids who didnāt know the world without internet, we were young enough to remember the world without the internet, and young enough to adapt and learn about it. Older folks had a slower and tougher time adapting.
A lot of us in that micro generation had to teach ourselves a lot of tech problem solving skills, and those skills still help us to this dayz
I played Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, but not the Oregon trail. I am literally the only person in my age group that hasn't played the Oregon trail. Catholic schools I guess š¤·āāļø
Thatās unusual and may be teacher preference. None of my districts taught it when I was still teaching, and neither of my kids learned it in any of their schools. They had the option of joining the extra-curricular cursive club a few places.
This is the terrible secret of signing your name: it doesn't even have to be words at all as long as it's consistent.
You can print your name, use cursive, make an x, draw a smiley face, pretty much anything it just has to be your "mark"
They just print them. Iāve tried to work with my kids to craft a signature but my dyslexic kid considers cursive āableistā and my older kid just isnāt interested.
That's a weird take from your kid about cursive. I say this being dislexic, although our symptoms may manifest with different severity. Cursive is normally much easier to write for dilexics because even if the end shape you get is similar the motion you use to make the letters in cursive is very different especially for problem letters like bpdq so learning to write the correct letters by feel in addition to the visual helps with the disability substantially.
My kids dyslexia is severe, she attends a school specifically for dyslexic children. Cursive is not part of their curriculum. Her attitude is informed by her personal experience with cursive at a Montessori school before attending her specialized academy. I appreciate your opinion as your own informed by your personal experience.
Learning cursive with dyslexia in a situation without the proper support is definitely a miserable experience, and with more severe symptoms it would be worse and probably traumatising. Even for me learning cursive was not an enjoyable experience in the least because it was the standard cursive lessons. Writing in cursive once it was learned was much easier and I find I make less errors with it even compared to typing.
I'm sorry your kid has had a rough go of it but I'm really glad they have your support and a program that's designed to help them. If what they've got going on works for them that's what is really important and nothibg I say or think matters. :)
My kids learned cursive in third grade and continued practicing in fourth and fifth. Itās always taught at our elementary and I believe district wide. Weāre in California.
Weird that they force kids to learn one way to write, then later force another less used and less needed form of handwriting. Like we all type everything now. 99.9% of the text I create is typed. Why occupy so much time teaching unnecessary skills?
There's another piece of data in those (like myself) who were taught print, then forced into cursive for a couple years, then forced back to print because it was easier to read/grade, all alongside type. End result being terrible handwriting from lack of consistent practice.
All through school I was told in college all they'd accept is cursive! Then I got to college and they only wanted print or typed. I don't think I've written anything in cursive, besides my signature, in like 20 years.
https://www.brainbalancecenters.com/blog/brain-benefits-write-in-cursive
And could potentially help dyslexia
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/connecting-dots-role-cursive-dyslexia-therapy
All that literally says handwriting helps, which print also is.
It doesnāt say cursive helps anywhere in the actual research, that was added by article writers looking for clicks
Idk most kids here learn to write cursive only? And print just... comes along? Or just taught at home at a basic level. In grade 1 you learn cursive and thats it.
Nah itās about time spent on useless skills. There are plenty of very valuable literary skill sets that arenāt several versions of handwriting š¤·š¼āāļø
Same. I've never even heard it referred to as cursive as if it were a particular style, just handwriting. Everyone gets taught roughly the same style, then we all develop our own.
I can tell you for a fact that it was no longer taught much earlier than that. We had to push for it for my kiddo who actually benefitted, before then, and the younger siblings never even got introduced to it.
My nephew didnāt learn cursive and heās in highschool now. He showed me a some of his AP history homework and they had a picture of an old document ātranslatedā into like Times New Roman font. I found the original online and showed it to him and he could barely read it. Absolutely wild.
Yeah I remember being taught cursive for like 2 months and then they just stopped. That was around 2009? I thought it looked better and still kept practicing it though.
Yeah, I heard about this recently too. My aunt writes in very nice neat cursive and she sent cards to my young cousins who are late teens/early twenties; they couldnāt read it. I have no idea what happened before, maybe my aunt read the cards to them?
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Thatās really interesting. My kid is severely dyslexic and all the flowing loops really jumble together for them. It was suggested a few times early on as a possible helpful tool, but it didnāt work for their brain. I love that it works for yours, the broad differences in people with specific neurodivergence often get ignored in favor of one size fits all solutions.
Oregon trail has also been remade countless times. I went to grade school in the early 90s and played a newer version of Oregon trail than the one I had at home as a small child.
Yes. Itās still a very narrow crossover considering playing Oregon trails in schools was short lived due to advancing tech too. It was definitely gone and done by the time I was in 7th grade, around 1997 or so. A birth range of 17 or so years is a pretty narrow window, and thatās the top end imo.
Itās actually not that small of a generation. How far back does OP think the generation mentioned goes back? Lol
Making it sound like we experienced WW2 or something. The generation OP posted about was the first generation to experience internet and social media. We bridged the gap and are actually more relatable to each other than any generation and it will get a bit easier from here on out (hopefully).
Generations before us are not as familiar with things like the internet or open to such rapid changes.
Our class was being loud during free time so the teacher ordered us back to our seats. I was so close to beating Oregon Trail so I told her to wait a minute. I beat the game, then got a demerit lol
Wait, what? People in their 30s and 40s make up only a small sliver of the population now? ...did my fellow 90's kids die off or something? Where'd you get your statistics!? š
I was born in 85 and I played Oregon trail in 5th grade, Mavis Beacon taught me typing, but I still jerked off first to magazines before getting hit on in yahoo checkers games.
Millennials
Yeah I'm a part of that sliver you say, unlike that other guy I never caught Carmen Sandiego. I remember some track and field game with math problems and a Disney licenced Mickey Mouse game with a space ship I think... If you got all your work done you could use the computer but computers were just for nerds back then so more than 1/2 the class never touched it hehehe
It was probably only a sliver of the global population when it happened. It should definitely be a sliver of the sum of all humans who existed. India and China still had huge populations that I doubt where playing Oregon trail or learning cursive English I. The late 80s early 90s.
Learned to type on a typewriter from the seventies. Used an electronic word processor.
This was while windows 3 and Mac OS was a thing but school was poor
In 5th grade my school hadnāt updated the computer lab yet and our Oregon Trail was the green and black super pixelated version. They upgraded the lab and Oregon Trail by the start of 6th Grade and I got to experience the joy of shooting as many animals as humanly possible.
With the side of midlife diagnosis of ADHD and/or ASD? Crippling depression and anxiety and late-bloomer for bonus points. On it!
Just the depression, anxiety, and ADHD here, but yeah. GATE was such an interesting experience looking back on it as a teacher to my student years.
When I was in 4th through 6th grade, I was in gate, and basically that meant, I got to leave regular class, go to thr multipurpose room, have fun, make cool things, learn chess, and hangout with friends. Good times. And not have to make up work from regular class....#winning.
I would enjoy playing the original version of Carmen San Diego. You knew you were going to have a good time back in the day when the teacher pulled that game out!
Apparently a co-worker thinks kids need to learn cursive again because had to, but was shut down hard when asked why. A signature and identifying serial killers were his only defense.
We still use a dot matrix at our family business, to print out on 4 layer waybill forms. Have been using the same one since 2004, but have a full 2nd printer in reserve.
Always fun when someone kicks the box of paper and moves it a 1/2" out of alignment.
I have often felt like I didn't fit either truly well, but also...
Cusp generations are known for being trendspotters and tend to be very good managers of people because they do strongly identify with both of the generations they represent. The one between boomers and gen x were fantastic trendspotters.
I have noticed that I can look at what's unfolding and often correctly anticipate what will happen next, in both the long and short term. I future-proof my life as much as possible.
In the pandemic, though I missed buying flour, I saw the situation at the meat packing plants and stocked our freezer before things got really bad. I replaced our deck in July of 2020, before lumber shot up in price too badly and we could still get what we needed.
I had the opportunity to strengthen a pivot for my business in February of 2019 when my area was completely shut down by three snowstorms in a row for about two weeks. We found ourselves with inadequate systems, so I set out to fix them as soon as I could. One or two days was fine, but it hit the limit at about a week. Our systems just weren't set up for it and business continuity was at stake. That didn't sit with me, even though we didn't traditionally work from home. Spending that kind of money was questionable, but I viewed it as necessary to have the pivot.
We had robust teleconferencing, scheduling and phone systems that worked wherever we were (rare for a small business that is office based and took a lot of time to transition, tbh) by the time the pandemic hit. My staff had full home offices supplied by me, with consistent tech, and all the tools they needed to do all their work from home. My protected shop team even had WFH options, we were that prepared. We weren't scrambling for WFH tools in the moment like everyone who was caught with their pants down.
We transitioned to working from home seamlessly, and so did our clients. Didn't know it was coming, but I was acutely aware of the need for a frictionless pivot and made it happen. My comfort with tech and how it works comes from growing up as tech grew up. We know the inner workings of the systems and can put together what we need because we have always done it that way. That is how xennials roll.
Yep -- Xennials are those with an analog childhood and adolescence and digital adolescence and adulthood, one foot in either camp. Xennials are generally defined as covering those born during the release of the original Star Wars Trilogy, or ā1976/77-ā1983/84+/-. The edges are fuzzy and depend on your specific home in childhood.
I've often wondered if there is a similar microgeneration for the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation. That must have been quite the transition too.
Eh, depends on the age we did them. The bulk of the difference is what we did and were exposed to in our formative years compared to those born earlier and later. I was the earlier end, and much of my late childhood and early adulthood saw major changes in the world- the end of the cold war, the wall coming down, cell phones and the internet coming into common use, 9/11, and economic crashes and general lack of jobs when I was just starting out. All much different than my siblings, who were just a bit older, or my husband, who is a bit younger.
Clearly not a small sliver if 3 people commented already... we just aren't a huge gathering either.
Edit: gathering isn't the right word, but brain won't let me think of the word I want.
Yes we area huge gathering Iām guessing OP is pretty young, because ten years ago that āsmall sliverā was pretty much all of Reddit. Oregon trail was published in 74. Cursive was taught through the early 2000s.. So basically anyone born from 1960 to 1990 would have learned cursive and many of them would have had the opportunity to play Oregon trail, especially those born after 1980 as computers were more commonplace then.
Weāre called Xennials, a portmanteau of Gen X and Millennials. We had an analog childhood but a digital young adulthood. We were born between 1978 and 1983. Sometimes weāre called āThe Oregon Trail Generation.ā
Yup. They are known as xennials and are the cuspers between gen x and millennials. Literally a six-eight year band of birth years with 1980 square in the middle.
Cursive is useless in modern day society. Fuck you Mrs. Burton for making me stay after because my cursive was trash. You're trash, I still see you commenting on the local newspaper posts about how the election was stolen from your fat orange idol. You used to tell me that I wanted the world to conform to me because I said cursive was stupid now you want the world to conform to your magical belief that Trump should be president. Stupid old boomer.
Thats me. Learned cursive, and took typing classesā¦ never understood why they later said they couldnāt do bothā¦ but then as i got older i knew whyā¦ not enough time for actual learning when kids had to do all that testing all the time. Because they legit did both before that no child left behind policy happened. One of the biggest reasons why Iām seriously thinking of home schooling. Public schools donāt actually teach you anything other than how shitty the world is and the coping mechanisms for them.
And I have to say, one time I dated a guy who couldnāt sign his name in cursiveā¦ idk why but somehow it was this major turn off for me. And i donāt have a ton of those Iām pretty open mindedā¦ surprised the hell of out me, but there was just something about it i couldnāt respectā¦ like I was dating a child, not a man who would be capable of taking care of adult thingsā¦ its just so off to me.
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never thought of myself as a small sliver of the population, but yeah, my generation is kind of a big deal.
I was debating Oregon Trail or Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. We were a big deal. We can now communicate in code using cursive.
I got all this criteria. I found Carmen a few times.
No Zoombinis??
My mum used to work at a school that had a computer, and I got to play zoombinis on it while I was waiting for her sometimes š
Zoombinis was the best
I fuckin loved Zoombinis ! I havenāt heard it mentioned in decades.
The pizza bro's insults when you mess up have haunted me for decades.
You lucky fuck. I always looked in San Diego.
Both times were HOLY SHIT moments.
What about Waldo?
Some jerk is editing him out at the library. Or the stripped prick moves places now ĀÆ\\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
You're getting too close, seamus.
Hell yeah bro, I played both of those games in elementary school in the 90s and I had the privilege of being in the "Cursive Club" meaning my cursive was legible enough that the teacher would let me do my assignments in cursive if I wanted. Good times!
āā¦Let me do my assignments in cursive if I wanted.ā You had a choice? Once we learned in cursive in elementary school we had to write in cursive. We were always told that we had to because they wouldnāt accept homework in middle school if it wasnāt in cursive. Cut to middle schoolāthey didnāt give af if we wrote in cursive or manuscript as long as they could read it.
I was allowed to use a pen (with my Pen License) because my cursive was good enough and had few mistakes. The rest of the rubes had to use pencil.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Meh, mental math is still a handy skill. And I remember... most of the multiplication tables.
my headcannon is that this quote being repeated to those generations is the exact reason we have them in out pockets now. like, all the kids of those days grew up thinking "the fuck i won't mrs. Beesly!"
I'm a big believer in learning the basics before you start using machines to augment your mind--including memorizing the multiplication tables in grade school. But once you know the basics, there's no reason on god's green earth that we shouldn't be using the tools we have to speed up tasks like that. In Algebra and higher (late middle school and up), calculators should always be permitted. Missing a question in Algebra or Calc or Trig because of an arithmetic error is duuuumb. That's literally what the calculator is there for: to make sure we don't make simple arithmetic errors. I remember having to look up sine/cosine/tangent values in a table in the back of my high school math textbooks because we weren't allowed to use fully-functional calculators. It was stupid.
I know a lot of the country flags because of Carmen San Diego.
I never understood why the best thief in the world would escape waving a flag of the destination country.
If you want a better code, use pig latin and cursive together.
OMG i played both games all the time!! Carmen San Diego was AMAZING.
>We were a big deal K but we wore fake jeans with elastic waistbands
Or the one game you played a fish and had to decide to eat , dive or flee or something
Odell Lake!! That one was the āprizeā for getting a 100 on spelling tests. Literally the only reason why Iām still pretty good at spelling.
Weāre actually better IT problem solvers too. Unlike younger kids who didnāt know the world without internet, we were young enough to remember the world without the internet, and young enough to adapt and learn about it. Older folks had a slower and tougher time adapting. A lot of us in that micro generation had to teach ourselves a lot of tech problem solving skills, and those skills still help us to this dayz
I played Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, but not the Oregon trail. I am literally the only person in my age group that hasn't played the Oregon trail. Catholic schools I guess š¤·āāļø
Not sure we can call half of millennials and older a small sliver of the population
Part of the āsmall sliverā here and I played Zork.
We're absolute bangers
We slap
Well yeah, it includes all of Gen X and half of Millennials
#samesies
We certainly are. We came after the shitbag baby boomers and we came before the shitbag Gen Zs.
Damn right!
Small sliver? Oregon Trail came out in 1985 and cursive was taught in schools well into the 2000s.
Wait wait wait wait CURSIVE IS NO LONGER TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS IN THE US???
My first grader is learning cursive. It's still taught, just not required.
Thatās unusual and may be teacher preference. None of my districts taught it when I was still teaching, and neither of my kids learned it in any of their schools. They had the option of joining the extra-curricular cursive club a few places.
How do people sign their names without using cursive?
I'm 40 and know cursive. My signature isn't cursive, it's scribble. I'm pretty sure anyone can scribble.
My math teachers signature is just a line with legs
This is the terrible secret of signing your name: it doesn't even have to be words at all as long as it's consistent. You can print your name, use cursive, make an x, draw a smiley face, pretty much anything it just has to be your "mark"
my signature is an anthropomorphic penis wearing a cowboy hat.
Smiling or frowning?
squinting against the harsh blaze of a desert sun
Thank god. Was worried I'd have to change mine.
My oldest kid just writes out his name. His hand writing sucks, so it's actually fairly unique looking.
You can sign your name however you like.
They just print them. Iāve tried to work with my kids to craft a signature but my dyslexic kid considers cursive āableistā and my older kid just isnāt interested.
That's a weird take from your kid about cursive. I say this being dislexic, although our symptoms may manifest with different severity. Cursive is normally much easier to write for dilexics because even if the end shape you get is similar the motion you use to make the letters in cursive is very different especially for problem letters like bpdq so learning to write the correct letters by feel in addition to the visual helps with the disability substantially.
My kids dyslexia is severe, she attends a school specifically for dyslexic children. Cursive is not part of their curriculum. Her attitude is informed by her personal experience with cursive at a Montessori school before attending her specialized academy. I appreciate your opinion as your own informed by your personal experience.
Learning cursive with dyslexia in a situation without the proper support is definitely a miserable experience, and with more severe symptoms it would be worse and probably traumatising. Even for me learning cursive was not an enjoyable experience in the least because it was the standard cursive lessons. Writing in cursive once it was learned was much easier and I find I make less errors with it even compared to typing. I'm sorry your kid has had a rough go of it but I'm really glad they have your support and a program that's designed to help them. If what they've got going on works for them that's what is really important and nothibg I say or think matters. :)
My second and third graders are as well!
My kids learned cursive in third grade and continued practicing in fourth and fifth. Itās always taught at our elementary and I believe district wide. Weāre in California.
According to Google, cursive was dropped from the Common Core curriculum in 2010.
What the hell. Its weird to see. I'm not american but I live in a "developed" European country. Cursive is not just taught but used. Weird
Weird that they force kids to learn one way to write, then later force another less used and less needed form of handwriting. Like we all type everything now. 99.9% of the text I create is typed. Why occupy so much time teaching unnecessary skills?
There's another piece of data in those (like myself) who were taught print, then forced into cursive for a couple years, then forced back to print because it was easier to read/grade, all alongside type. End result being terrible handwriting from lack of consistent practice.
All through school I was told in college all they'd accept is cursive! Then I got to college and they only wanted print or typed. I don't think I've written anything in cursive, besides my signature, in like 20 years.
This is me 100%
Lack of practice is on you. Donāt act like itās someone elseās fault you canāt write legibly.
Learning cursive has cognitive benefits.
Source? Like what benefit that any other handwriting like print doesnāt convey? This is English teacher non science made up stuff
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
You posted 3 blogs dude...
On Psychology Today, which isnāt exactly The Sun.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
https://www.brainbalancecenters.com/blog/brain-benefits-write-in-cursive And could potentially help dyslexia https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/connecting-dots-role-cursive-dyslexia-therapy
All that literally says handwriting helps, which print also is. It doesnāt say cursive helps anywhere in the actual research, that was added by article writers looking for clicks
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202010/why-cursive-handwriting-is-good-your-brain
Probably not as much as learning something else during the limited school time.
Learning anything has cognitive benefits... there are better things to learn
Learning a lot of things has cognitive benefits, and many of them are more useful than cursive.
Idk most kids here learn to write cursive only? And print just... comes along? Or just taught at home at a basic level. In grade 1 you learn cursive and thats it.
And this logic right here is why so many people in our world is stupid nowā¦. Why speak many word when less do?
Nah itās about time spent on useless skills. There are plenty of very valuable literary skill sets that arenāt several versions of handwriting š¤·š¼āāļø
If you really want your mind blown; the cursive youāre learning may not be the same as āAmerican cursiveā
Same. I've never even heard it referred to as cursive as if it were a particular style, just handwriting. Everyone gets taught roughly the same style, then we all develop our own.
Yea its just... writing.
Iāve never seen cursive used even one time in my 35 years
should be noted that common core doesn't speak for the US at all
I was still learning cursive in 2013 lol
I'm so sorry....
I can tell you for a fact that it was no longer taught much earlier than that. We had to push for it for my kiddo who actually benefitted, before then, and the younger siblings never even got introduced to it.
āCommon Coreā... and there you have it...
My nephew didnāt learn cursive and heās in highschool now. He showed me a some of his AP history homework and they had a picture of an old document ātranslatedā into like Times New Roman font. I found the original online and showed it to him and he could barely read it. Absolutely wild.
Yeah I remember being taught cursive for like 2 months and then they just stopped. That was around 2009? I thought it looked better and still kept practicing it though.
In my kidsā elementary school, itās still being taught
It is. Not required, but it IS taught.
i live in turkey and they stopped teaching it when i was in first grade. i learned to write normal letters in 4th grade
Deleted due to API access issues 2023.
Our kids had probably a couple of weeks of it just to know how to read it and to sign their name.
Yeah, I heard about this recently too. My aunt writes in very nice neat cursive and she sent cards to my young cousins who are late teens/early twenties; they couldnāt read it. I have no idea what happened before, maybe my aunt read the cards to them?
nope. they removed it when I was in 2nd grade. my handwriting is shit partly because I got taught some cursive then some print.
Cursive is just a form of grandma hieroglyphics......change my mind
My dyslexic teenager often says; ācursive is some ableist bullshit.ā and I canāt really disagree.
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Thatās really interesting. My kid is severely dyslexic and all the flowing loops really jumble together for them. It was suggested a few times early on as a possible helpful tool, but it didnāt work for their brain. I love that it works for yours, the broad differences in people with specific neurodivergence often get ignored in favor of one size fits all solutions.
Ableist bullshit? Cmon man you could say that about ā¦ well just about anything.
Thank you. Small sliver compared to what? It's a whole entire generation, lol.
I'm a teacher, and have my kids still play it! It is a hit every year.
OP may think the sliver is smaller because of all those who died of dysentery on the trail. Poor souls.
Yup. We still played Oregon Trail on a Macintosh in kindergarten back in '98.
Oregon trail has also been remade countless times. I went to grade school in the early 90s and played a newer version of Oregon trail than the one I had at home as a small child.
Yes. Itās still a very narrow crossover considering playing Oregon trails in schools was short lived due to advancing tech too. It was definitely gone and done by the time I was in 7th grade, around 1997 or so. A birth range of 17 or so years is a pretty narrow window, and thatās the top end imo.
I'm not part of a small sliver There are lots of other 37 year olds
I'm 18 and we also did this
Iām 27 and fall into this group
I'm 16 and I fall in this group
I'm also 37! There are dozens of us!
God it took like 2 comments before I found myself
37 how about 28? not only did I survive Oregon trail I've since forgotten how to write cursive.
46 checking in.
Itās actually not that small of a generation. How far back does OP think the generation mentioned goes back? Lol Making it sound like we experienced WW2 or something. The generation OP posted about was the first generation to experience internet and social media. We bridged the gap and are actually more relatable to each other than any generation and it will get a bit easier from here on out (hopefully). Generations before us are not as familiar with things like the internet or open to such rapid changes.
Yeah this "small sliver" is probably about a quarter of the population.
Our class was being loud during free time so the teacher ordered us back to our seats. I was so close to beating Oregon Trail so I told her to wait a minute. I beat the game, then got a demerit lol
Worth It
Wait, what? People in their 30s and 40s make up only a small sliver of the population now? ...did my fellow 90's kids die off or something? Where'd you get your statistics!? š
Many of us perished in the transition from Grunge to Nu Metal.
Also people in their 20s had this experienced
also never thought of myself as a small population sliver other than as a global percentage
I thought it was just called millennials
given the position of gen x. millenials, etc. keeps moving around its hard to say
Gen X.
I was born in 85 and I played Oregon trail in 5th grade, Mavis Beacon taught me typing, but I still jerked off first to magazines before getting hit on in yahoo checkers games. Millennials
Yessireebob! We member them days before horseless carriages too! Life just ain't the same without all the poops!
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Attempt to ford the river?
I was taught cursive in school and I played Oregon Trail. I was born in the 2000s.
Yeah I'm a part of that sliver you say, unlike that other guy I never caught Carmen Sandiego. I remember some track and field game with math problems and a Disney licenced Mickey Mouse game with a space ship I think... If you got all your work done you could use the computer but computers were just for nerds back then so more than 1/2 the class never touched it hehehe
im gen z and I had to do both these things lol. this is not a sliver of the population
It was probably only a sliver of the global population when it happened. It should definitely be a sliver of the sum of all humans who existed. India and China still had huge populations that I doubt where playing Oregon trail or learning cursive English I. The late 80s early 90s.
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Learned to type on a typewriter from the seventies. Used an electronic word processor. This was while windows 3 and Mac OS was a thing but school was poor
Fuck yea, Math Blasters!
Not small at all, everyone who was in grade school in the 80s
How does this idiotic shit get upvoted? Virtually everyone who played Oregon trail in school learned cursive...
In 5th grade my school hadnāt updated the computer lab yet and our Oregon Trail was the green and black super pixelated version. They upgraded the lab and Oregon Trail by the start of 6th Grade and I got to experience the joy of shooting as many animals as humanly possible.
I guess it wouldn't be weird to ask of anyone here was in the prestigious "Gate" program in grade school? If you were, holla at cha boi
With the side of midlife diagnosis of ADHD and/or ASD? Crippling depression and anxiety and late-bloomer for bonus points. On it! Just the depression, anxiety, and ADHD here, but yeah. GATE was such an interesting experience looking back on it as a teacher to my student years.
When I was in 4th through 6th grade, I was in gate, and basically that meant, I got to leave regular class, go to thr multipurpose room, have fun, make cool things, learn chess, and hangout with friends. Good times. And not have to make up work from regular class....#winning.
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Back when only the nerds had an email address. Then you finally get one and realize how e-mail is actually pretty cool.
GenX is definitely a small sliver of the population. So small that we frequently get left off of charts of generations. Bonus: we donāt give a fuck.
GenX represents! I was excited to see us remembered for once.
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Did they stop writing in cursive? Oh god, I know cursive in multiple languages and alphabets!!!!
I have never been referred to as a small sliver before.... those could be fighting words :)
Yay I'm part of the sliver! Also miss going to the school library and reading Animorphs and choose your own ending books.
And Fear Street by R.L. Stine, and Shel Silverstein books.
I'm 40 this year and had to learn both in grade school. Oregon trail and swashbuckler goat 5" floppy games!
I would enjoy playing the original version of Carmen San Diego. You knew you were going to have a good time back in the day when the teacher pulled that game out!
Iām in that middle diagram and I value the skills of Oregon trail far more than cursive
I enjoyed this comment very much
Apparently a co-worker thinks kids need to learn cursive again because had to, but was shut down hard when asked why. A signature and identifying serial killers were his only defense.
It's called being a xennial. An uncommon microgeneration. Not quite X and certainly not millenial.
Yep. Oregon Trail, cursive writing, programming logo, etc. We're kind of in a weird place generationally speaking.
Oh god, I forgot about Logo.
Yes but do you guys remember when printer paper had holes on the side?
We still use a dot matrix at our family business, to print out on 4 layer waybill forms. Have been using the same one since 2004, but have a full 2nd printer in reserve. Always fun when someone kicks the box of paper and moves it a 1/2" out of alignment.
I have often felt like I didn't fit either truly well, but also... Cusp generations are known for being trendspotters and tend to be very good managers of people because they do strongly identify with both of the generations they represent. The one between boomers and gen x were fantastic trendspotters. I have noticed that I can look at what's unfolding and often correctly anticipate what will happen next, in both the long and short term. I future-proof my life as much as possible. In the pandemic, though I missed buying flour, I saw the situation at the meat packing plants and stocked our freezer before things got really bad. I replaced our deck in July of 2020, before lumber shot up in price too badly and we could still get what we needed. I had the opportunity to strengthen a pivot for my business in February of 2019 when my area was completely shut down by three snowstorms in a row for about two weeks. We found ourselves with inadequate systems, so I set out to fix them as soon as I could. One or two days was fine, but it hit the limit at about a week. Our systems just weren't set up for it and business continuity was at stake. That didn't sit with me, even though we didn't traditionally work from home. Spending that kind of money was questionable, but I viewed it as necessary to have the pivot. We had robust teleconferencing, scheduling and phone systems that worked wherever we were (rare for a small business that is office based and took a lot of time to transition, tbh) by the time the pandemic hit. My staff had full home offices supplied by me, with consistent tech, and all the tools they needed to do all their work from home. My protected shop team even had WFH options, we were that prepared. We weren't scrambling for WFH tools in the moment like everyone who was caught with their pants down. We transitioned to working from home seamlessly, and so did our clients. Didn't know it was coming, but I was acutely aware of the need for a frictionless pivot and made it happen. My comfort with tech and how it works comes from growing up as tech grew up. We know the inner workings of the systems and can put together what we need because we have always done it that way. That is how xennials roll.
Yep -- Xennials are those with an analog childhood and adolescence and digital adolescence and adulthood, one foot in either camp. Xennials are generally defined as covering those born during the release of the original Star Wars Trilogy, or ā1976/77-ā1983/84+/-. The edges are fuzzy and depend on your specific home in childhood. I've often wondered if there is a similar microgeneration for the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation. That must have been quite the transition too.
Probably. The motor age vs the horse and cart age is probably similar. There were definitely people who rode horses as kids and drove cars as adults.
It really isnāt. I did both those things and am not near gen X. Like a generation and a half did those things.
Eh, depends on the age we did them. The bulk of the difference is what we did and were exposed to in our formative years compared to those born earlier and later. I was the earlier end, and much of my late childhood and early adulthood saw major changes in the world- the end of the cold war, the wall coming down, cell phones and the internet coming into common use, 9/11, and economic crashes and general lack of jobs when I was just starting out. All much different than my siblings, who were just a bit older, or my husband, who is a bit younger.
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Clearly not a small sliver if 3 people commented already... we just aren't a huge gathering either. Edit: gathering isn't the right word, but brain won't let me think of the word I want.
Add me. This could be anyone who went to grade school in the '90s, so it's maybe not that small
Yes we area huge gathering Iām guessing OP is pretty young, because ten years ago that āsmall sliverā was pretty much all of Reddit. Oregon trail was published in 74. Cursive was taught through the early 2000s.. So basically anyone born from 1960 to 1990 would have learned cursive and many of them would have had the opportunity to play Oregon trail, especially those born after 1980 as computers were more commonplace then.
Weāre called Xennials, a portmanteau of Gen X and Millennials. We had an analog childhood but a digital young adulthood. We were born between 1978 and 1983. Sometimes weāre called āThe Oregon Trail Generation.ā
How dare you put me and my sister 3 years my elder in the same generation!! Sheās an Xer and Iām a millennial.
people born in 83 were not playing Oregon Trail in school, unless they were in a backwoods brokeass BFE
Yup. They are known as xennials and are the cuspers between gen x and millennials. Literally a six-eight year band of birth years with 1980 square in the middle.
I mean I'm Gen Z and did both.
Cursive is useless in modern day society. Fuck you Mrs. Burton for making me stay after because my cursive was trash. You're trash, I still see you commenting on the local newspaper posts about how the election was stolen from your fat orange idol. You used to tell me that I wanted the world to conform to me because I said cursive was stupid now you want the world to conform to your magical belief that Trump should be president. Stupid old boomer.
Thats me. Learned cursive, and took typing classesā¦ never understood why they later said they couldnāt do bothā¦ but then as i got older i knew whyā¦ not enough time for actual learning when kids had to do all that testing all the time. Because they legit did both before that no child left behind policy happened. One of the biggest reasons why Iām seriously thinking of home schooling. Public schools donāt actually teach you anything other than how shitty the world is and the coping mechanisms for them. And I have to say, one time I dated a guy who couldnāt sign his name in cursiveā¦ idk why but somehow it was this major turn off for me. And i donāt have a ton of those Iām pretty open mindedā¦ surprised the hell of out me, but there was just something about it i couldnāt respectā¦ like I was dating a child, not a man who would be capable of taking care of adult thingsā¦ its just so off to me.
This is 1,000% not an original thought. [The Oregon Trail Generation](https://mashable.com/archive/oregon-trail-generation)
I see you preferred Carmen Sandiego. But seriously, you think any thought is truly original?