what are they teaching our children?

before email, in order to send a letter to someone, one had to write words down on a piece of paper, fold it and put it into an envelope. one would then have to place information on the outside of the envelope with a stamp and place it in a big blue box called a mailbox where a person called a mail carrier would pick it up and take it back to a place called the post office where it would be sorted by the information on the envelope, given to another mail carrier, and then be delivered to the person to whom it was addressed.

i know this because i was taught how to do it in grade school, before email became my primary means of sending information to another person. however, i do still on occasion need to put something in the mail where i use the above technique.

last weekend hubby and i went on a confirmation retreat with 20 kids grades 6-9. we wanted to teach them about how they had gifts that they could share with others and part of the process was to have them do a service project. the service project was to send appeal letters to other churches asking them to participate in something called God's Global Barnyard which is the ELCA's (my denomination) version of heifer international.

i made the service project as simple as possible... they basically had to stuff and address envelopes with information that i gave them and then they had to come up with a project to do in their own church.

had i known that many of them didn't know how to address an envelope properly i would have told them about return addresses and where the stamp had to go and where on the envelope the addresse's information went. silly me, assuming that they would have learned this in school by the 6th grade.

hubby says that we are old. afterall, mail is sent electronically now. in fact, when i did a google image search of "mail" this is what i got. of the 20 images of "mail" there was only one picture that showed an envelope (and that was clip art) and 1 picture of what looks like the inside of a post office. there were 2 pictures of george w and somehow i can't help but think that there is a correlation between his no child left behind and the fact that kids almost in high school have no idea how to address an envelope!

sigh, they aren't teaching cursive writing anymore either.

God's peace y'all