Mrs. Piper
on February 2, 2021 at 1:01 amChapter: Tales Told out of School
Characters: David Walkerton, Mrs. Piper
Location: Joyce and Walky's apartment
Mrs. Piper is the name of my actual second grade teacher. And the first panel is apparently very feasible — I googled her just now to see if she was still alive, and some sketchy website presented me with a very plausible address and phone number! WOW. YIKES. Uh.
I will not be cold-calling some 80-year-old woman to yell at her, no.
Look, I know it’s not your fault, Mrs. Piper, you (and every teacher until I got to college) didn’t know this was imminently outdated technology. I’M STILL KINDA PISSY THOUGH, IT WAS ALL VERY TEDIOUS
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I mean, I’d assume these days kids learn how to tediously input that information into database software.
no you just shout “ALEXA FIND ME THIS BOOK I WANT” into the void
That’s not…
INaccurate…
I wonder a lot about the current generation of kids growing up in households with these smartspeakers. Will they go out into the world thinking the entire planet works like the starship Enterprise (TNG) and you can just address the air to get any information you want?
There’s gotta be some school teachers who’ve had young students embarrass themselves by asking Alexa for the answer on a test they’re writing by now, hasn’t there? I’d get a kick out of some of those stories.
I’m so young it took me a minute to figure out what this comic was talking about, since physical filing systems haven’t existed in libraries In my life
At least when I learned how to do card catalog entries, they still had a decade or so to be useful.
When I was in college I had a job in the sub-basement of the University Library keeping track of which books were checked out using big trays in rotary machines inyo which we placed photos of student’s IDs alongside the bibliographic info of books they checked out and from which we pulled them when they returned them. Patrons called us from upstairs using phones at the main service counter to check on the status of books they wanted. A class of Library Science students once visited us, viewing the operation with great reverence: imagine an entire class of Claires (from QC).
My elementary school was still teaching us how to look up stuff from card catalogs even though the public library had already digitized their catalog. I don’t think we ever learned how to create card entries, just how to read and find them.
You think it was tedious for you?
Mrs. Piper had to do it year after year after year.
But if we don’t teach kids what a card catalog is, they won’t have the context they need to understand that scene in Ghostbusters!
My elementary school had Commodore 64s and Apple IIe-s in the classrooms (and only a couple per room) and a “computer lab” table in the library with a couple dozen Packard Bell Legends running Windows 95 (which was brand new at the time). The library had one printer, a color inkjet they protected like it was all the gold at Fort Knox because its ink was expensive. And yeah, we had to learn card catalogs. At least the town library was using a minicomputer and dumb terminals by then!
One year we had an Apple IIgs, and I found the GS/OS boot disks spread across a couple rooms. That was interesting, because it was almost like the Mac we had at home.
I revisited the school about 10 years ago for some town thing. They were still running the library database off a IIe…
I think we may have learned how to find books and stuff using the card catalog when I was a kid in school, but I don’t know if we learned how to make new card entries. Though my teachers definitely didn’t spend months on it, it does seem pretty useless now that you can just look up library books and stuff on computers.
Ah yes, if only our education could have anticipated how quickly information technology would change the working world beyond recognition… correctly. I think that we probably would have accepted all those dystopian ‘everything is a cubicle farm’ visions instead of the current Dilbert-inspired nightmare.
Honestly, that sort of stuff strikes me as more useful than the actual computer class I got back in the eighties, which I remember as something like “This … is a computer. It is going to change the world, but we have no idea how. Until we’ve figured it out, just play Chuckie Egg or something.”
Most of the stuff we had to do in school is kinda pointless; no one since has ever asked me to point out Lake Ontario on the map (possibly because I live in Toronto and it’s like right there), or calculate the length of a hypotenuse, or explain what the author was really trying to say in a RFP my boss received…
I get that it’s all the basic skills involved and social interactions and whatnot. It’s the destination, not the journey. Or something.
I think I learned about the card catalog in the first grade. I don’t remember how long we spent on it. I have memories OF the card catalog (that is to say, I could easily recognize one if I saw it) but I don’t remember actually using them outside of those lessons.
My wife was a librarian for 22 years before her Sciatica forced her into early retirement. She still knows the card system cold, and she learned the networking so she could help the IT people who were woefully underinformed (as well as the teachers who were in over their heads already) and was on the team that decommissioned the libraries when the Catholic School System went all-digital. Imag9ne how SHE feels ab9ut computers!