More Adventures in Education (and Growing Old)

Last week, in my senior English classes, we read the last page of Joan Didion's masterpiece about the counterculture in San Francisco in the late 1960s: "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" -- I was showing them an excellent example of descriptive writing with minimal intrusion from the author-- the subtext of the scenarios are enough to get the point across-- and I learned something: the vast majority of my students know NOTHING about the counterculture movement in San Francisco in the late 1960s . . . when I got the feeling that this passage needed more context, I asked them what was going on in San Francisco back then and one kid said, "The gold rush?" and I had to explain he was a century late and reminded him of the name of the football team and all that-- and the students had never heard of The Grateful Dead and hadn't heard the term "acid" for LSD . . . it was eye-opening because back in the day, high school students knew about the Grateful Dead because it had something to do with marijuana-- but now marijuana is legal and the Grateful Dead are no longer in this generation's popular mythology-- a few kids vaguely knew the term "hippies" but they did NOT know about communes and acid parties and jam bands and orgies and the Summer of Love or any of that . . . and when I asked what band was associated with this time period, from two classes I got the same answer: The Beatles . . . and then we went over that the Beatles were from England and there was one girl (I taught this girl's mom) that was able to name three of the Beatles (she couldn't recall George Harrison) and when I asked if anyone knew the fourth Beatle, a senior boy said, confidently, "Michael Jackson" and I had to more stuff . . . and the moral of the story is that I am getting old (but I was pleased to learn that Ariana Grande has a music video that is a tribute to my favorite movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).