Monday, January 07, 2008

The Envelope, Please!

This evening, 18-year-old Aleks hand-wrote an address and licked placed a stamp on an envelope FOR THE FIRST TIME! He has applied to three colleges, taken the SATs, submitted the FAFSA, applied for scholarships and done a variety of other college-related tasks without ever leaving the comfort of his laptop... until now.

I was shocked when he asked me how to address an envelope (and --justifiably -- expressed concern about his atrocious handwriting!) and where to place the stamp... until he told me that he's never in his life snail-mailed a letter! And the only reason he went off-line this evening was to provide a teacher with a snail-mail envelope in which to mail a recommendation.

Talk about the digital generation!

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7 comments:

Goofball said...

wow, that's food for thought :)


...or are we just getting old than?

Rositta said...

Kind of scary that, isn't it. I saw a news story about a whole generation that will not know how to write a letter by hand..ciao

Anonymous said...

Holy cow! It would have never occured to me that kids nowadays don't know how to do those things.

Jen said...

That's remarkable! I'm glad he's learned that skill now. ;-)

Anonymous said...

Wow! a young adult who's never written a thank you note to grandma, etc? Never watched you send cards through the mail? Never gotten a birthday card in the mail and observed how it was done? Are you sure he wasn't just pulling your leg!? :)

Carol said...

When the kids were young, they'd write thank-you notes to grandparents and I'd send them. Later, that was done via e-mail or phone calls. (Yes, I made the decision not to hound them to hand-write a note -- that a higher-tech, more comfortable acknowledgment was better than none...) I'm sure that he'd have been able to guess where the stamps and addresses went if I'd have quizzed him, but just his discomfort with the whole hand-written, hand-addressed envelope astounded me!

And yet -- think about it... when DO these kids write and mail actual letters?!

Thanks for your feedback!

Carol

J said...

suddenly I feel really really old.

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