Back To School Without Rodney

At this time last year, I was anticipating, somewhat eagerly I'll admit, the end of another school year, one that would be my last as an official public school teacher. New vistas would open, and I'd find out for sure if all that retirement talk about "six Saturdays and a Sunday" was real or just a cruel hoax perpetrated by unhappy retirees looking for someone to share their misery. Exactly one year later, I find myself sitting in a classroom for three hours today, remembering why I disliked summer school so much all those years.
Oh,I love learning, and the idea of going to school in the summer is hardly a new one for me or any other teacher. We do it all the time, in spite of all the wags who decry our "three-month vacation." Today, though, was just a bit much for a variety of reasons.
Of course, we got a break about two hours into the class, but the teacher then decided to stand right under the clock for the next hour. I'm not normally a clock-watcher, but it was awfully hard to ignore the thing RIGHT ABOVER HER HEAD!
The inevitable personal introductions were featured, and I'm not generally much of a self-discloser at such times since I don't know these people, and there is little chance we'll ever be close friends. However, I was the last one to introduce myself, and after hearing everyone discuss his or her upcoming student teaching assignments, I could not resist saying, "Hi, I'm Darrell, and I finished my student teaching in the spring of 1972." Needless to say, that raised a few eyebrows, though it could have been worse. I could have said that I was just there to learn something and not to get credit for it. I am, in fact, auditing a class on teaching reading in the content area in preparation for my continuing work with student-athletes. There was one moment, though, that left even me feeling a lot older than I usually do.
The instructor had placed the following on an overhead: "There is a bear in a plain brown wrapper doing flip flops on 78 with a camera handing out green stamps." When the instructor asked us to decode (a word they all seem to use) the message, I was the only one to raise a hand since I'd already read the text and had seen the example. When no "real" student volunteered a guess, the instructor said, "I'll give you a clue. It has to do with CB radios." Here's the amazing part: NOBODY UNDERSTOOD WHAT SHE WAS TALKING ABOUT BECAUSE NOBODY KNEW WHAT A CB RADIO WAS!!!! After the awkward pause, I mentioned the obvious: that everyone was too young to have heard of a citizen's band radio. When I mentioned the movie "Smokey and the Bandit," one person figured that the "bear" was a policeman (10-4 good buddy), then (being bright, would-be teachers) the crowd caught on and decoded (now I'm using it)the message.
I was left dumbstruck...not that they didn't know about that era, but that I knew about eras LONG BEFORE the CB age! It was enough to make me look for some "Just For Men" or drop a reference to something more current, like Woodstock.
All in all, it was enough to make me want to take a nap, and I would have, too, except there was homework, on the first day, no less! My head is already full: TMI!