The other day I was on my way to pick up my daughter from school and I was updating her on my location so she can get ready and be at the gate as soon as arrive. We don’t have vehicle access and parking stickers for the school anymore because I don’t like going through the hassle and paying extra for a service/privilege that should already be included in the tuition fee and anyway, my kids are already old enough to be picked up on the street, so that is what we do.
We have a set of prearranged curbside pickup spots, and depending on either which part of school she is coming from, or how bad I see the traffic is, depending on Google Maps, we make arrangements on where the pickup will be. Because we don’t have much parking options since in-school parking is prohibited for non-paying parents, she would ideally be waiting for me at the agreed pickup area.
Anyway, I was en route and told her I was near Hua Ming and since she didn’t respond, I assumed she got the message and would make the necessary adjustments to be at the pickup spot on time.
When I got there, she wasn’t at the prearranged pick up point yet, so I had to give her a call to remind her I was already there. Fortunately for me, there was some street parking available, so I just waited a bit. If street parking were unavailable, I can always double park, as long as I turn on my hazard lights which allow Filipino drivers to do anything they please, right?
As she hopped in the car after a short wait, I grumpily asked her what took her so long since she knew I was already near Hua Ming in my last update. She then sheepishly told me that she doesn’t know where it is exactly.
At that point I just laughed at how ridiculous it was for my daughter not to know where Hua Ming is, as I always assumed that it was a known Bacolod City landmark. It made me wonder if that meant my daughter is totally oblivious to the landmarks of the city she lives in, or if it is no longer important for their generation, perhaps because that location has lost its relevance ever since its church was shut down by a spat between the school and the bishop. I found it interesting how that conflict could have such wide-ranging effects, including my daughter no longer automatically knowing where Hua Ming is in reference to her school, because if you come to think of it, it has been years since we’ve heard mass there.
My daughter not knowing what should be a well-known local landmark also made me wonder if it is just her, or is it her entire generation that would have trouble getting around without their smartphones and the map app. I wonder if they even know where their friends’ homes are, if those friends don’t share a location pin before they leave their own homes. I remember back in my day, we had to memorize phone numbers and addresses if we wanted to go visit our friends’ homes. Kids these days don’t even know where Hua Ming is and that makes me feel either pretty damn old, or a failure as a parent because it looks like I have a high school kid who doesn’t know how to get around the city on their own. How is she going to follow in her older sibling’s footsteps and study abroad if she doesn’t even know where Hua Ming is? It looks like I still have a lot of parenting to do for this one.
But again, if you come to think of it, maybe the life skills that I thought were important, such as navigation without a smartphone, memorizing telephone numbers, tying knots, lighting a match (or a firecracker) successfully and safely, are no longer essential these days because my kids’ generation has a world of information at their fingertips. If my daughter really wanted to know where Hua Ming was, she could probably locate it within a few seconds. If she really wanted to know where I was relative to her location, all she had to do was bring up our family location sharing app, and she’d know my exact location, all without needing to know all the local landmarks that her Gen X dad has memorized by heart. It’s just surprising to find out they don’t know some of the things that we assumed they should’ve known by now, but maybe they’re also surprised that their parents know so many things that are actually either redundant or useless.
The only way people from my generation can get an edge over kids these days is if we don’t renew their data plan and lock them out of wifi signals, which should unsmart their phones and dumb them down by extension.
The world is changing. Those of us who are watching it rush by can either complain that the skills that we thought were essential are being set aside by technology and the next generation, or we can just go with the flow, adapt along with them, and maybe enjoy the ride, confident that if a planet-wide black out or solar storm knocks out the internet, we might end up being useful once more.*
