Anytime I can share wisdom or knowledge with my grandchildren is a good time for me. This year I was lucky enough to take a trip to Europe and have my twenty-one-year-old Grandson come along.
So one could say we had a baby boomer and a post-millennial traveling together. Things became very interesting when we could not use our cell phones because of data plan restrictions. The rental car did not have GPS, so there we were on the motorway with a paper map.
What I found is that we have a young generation of people that don’t know how to use an old fashioned map.
— the kind with a scale and cardinal directions.
Instead of giving in to following it myself, I gave Grandson a pencil and had him tag our beginning and end for the day’s itinerary. Many times he turned it left, and set it right and even seemed eager to learn this method.
The next little tip I shared with him was how to walk and check out the menus on a restaurant window.
As we walked through Vienna, I said: “why don’t you start looking for a place we can have dinner tonight?”
He instinctively went to his phone that did not work. At that point, I suggested maybe we could read menu’s on restaurant windows as we pass them.
Together we made a good team, as it turned out the most significant challenge we had was pronouncing the names of German and French Streets.
Great teaching! I taught my 14 year old grand daughter to use a real dictionary over the summer. The ole Webster. Gave her a list of words to look up & write the definitions. It was priceless!
That’s awesome – I agree, the youngins are missing out on learning/using the non-tech skills of living. Mine two kids remind me often, “Just use your phone mom!” I must confess, it does speed up the process of getting around when the service is there for us to use the phones!