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Gord Turner: Change — for the better?

We were told to push students to accept change, and to encourage our colleagues to change approaches
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When I was a beginning instructor, I attended many workshops where the buzz was all about change.

We were told we had to push students to accept change, that we had to encourage our colleagues to change their approaches, and that change was inevitable.

What I discovered was that despite the “change” philosophy, most people don’t want change, especially if they’re middle to old age citizens. They become set in their ways, and it’s so comfortable to always park in the same spot and to use tried and true ways.

And then along came computers, and many of us weren’t ready for them. It took me three or four years to use computers adequately. Even today, I often only use the computer for limited Internet sourcing and as a sophisticated typewriter. Once I caught on to writing using Microsoft Word, I packed up my IBM Selectric and stored it in the basement. It’s so easy to edit and revise on the computer.

Just as with the TV that arrived in the 1950s and was supposed to make learning so much easier—and didn’t, so with the computer. While it simplifies a lot of information storage and gets us access to everything out there in the world, it does not save time. It could if we simply did our computer tasks and left it behind, but most of us spend hours on the computer googling and following our friends on Facebook. Logging into the Internet often means we will have little time left in each day to do our other tasks.

Young people seem to manage change more easily than us old coots. We’re still hanging on to a land-based phone with several portables throughout the house. We don’t own a cell or smart phone and frankly have never had much use for one. Again, neither my wife nor I need to text anyone regularly.

My kids, however, and their partners only have smart phones. They have them handy all the time—as if they’re going to miss some great event or some scintillating conversation. I watch people all the time coming out of shops and businesses and immediately opening up their phones, scrolling to see if some friend somewhere has sent a message.

Couples sit in restaurants across from each other, both sifting through the clutter on their phones to see if something important might be there. Never mind that both of them checked their cell phones in the car before entering the establishment. Once we saw a couple locate each other in a restaurant by cell phone rather than by spending a moment or two looking. Just recently, we received our municipal tax notices in the mail.

Among the ways to pay your taxes is the writing of a cheque. While that works well for us because we still use a few cheques each year, it won’t work for my grown-up children. They do not have cheques, and they don’t order cheques, and I’m not sure they’d know how to fill out a cheque if required.

Their generation has changed how they pay things. Mostly, their method is online, and so a municipal tax bill would be an electronic transaction. Many of them probably have never been inside City Hall. Some changes I’m willing to grab onto, and others I look at as unnecessary — at least for how I live my life. I’m happy, though, not having to pull corks out of wine bottles every time I lift a glass.

Twist-off caps have made life slightly easier, and I guess that’s what a lot of this change is about.