Feral Teachers of the Digital Apocalypse

You know what’s absolutely wild?

The fact that I taught my parents how to search the internet on google, how to set up their wifi router, how to use facebook. And I’m teaching my students how to use google, write documents in google docs, and use ChatGPT.

While at the same time I remember having to write essays in middle and high school using encyclopedias that weighed more than my childhood trauma.

Now my students are looking down the void of google.com, whispering, “Ms. Neves… how do I use it?” like it’s a haunted artifact in a pyramid and we are archeologists in an Indiana Jones film.

I am a feral teacher of the digital apocalypse. I’m bridging the gap between “be kind, please rewind” and “Hey ChatGPT, write me a 5 paragraph essay about how the stomach works.” I remember when information had texture. When you had to go to the library, smell the books, talk to someone to find that information, feel the yellowed pages, and fight for the information. Now people can summon the universe with a keystroke… and still don’t know how to fucking change the font in Google Docs.

It’s not their fault though. Millennials learned search logic. We had to understand the system to get the answers. The dewey decimal system, file paths, dos prompts, boolean operators, LimeWire disaster recovery. These were our survival skills. The systems understand people now. So curiosity and comprehension got soft.

But fuck, it’s maddening. Like watching someone drown in a kiddie pool with floats on. Meanwhile, I’m over here screaming from the deep end like, “I USED TO TYPE REPORTS IN WORDPAD AND PRINT THEM ON DOT MATRIX PAPER YOU UNGRATEFUL LITTLE GEN-ALPHABETS!”

Millennials are the last ones to know how to break and rebuild the internet by hand. The last ones to smell ozone and hear dial-up noise and remember how it felt when you were mid AIM chat with your crush and your mom picked up the phone. When connection could be lost by a simple act, and getting it back still felt like magic.