"Click floppy disk to save" - MA'AM, FLUFFY WHAT?

When you work as a teacher, you often don't feel much of a generation gap with your students. But every once in a while, a moment hits you: "Wait, you don't know this?"

It happened during a language arts class. The students had drafted essays in their textbooks, gone through several rounds of revision with me, and finally moved to the computer lab to type their work in MS Word—paying attention to grammar and punctuation as they typed. For kids who had only ever used computers for games and casual chatting, transferring "correct, polished writing" into Word was no easy task. As we wrapped up the lesson, I said:

"Before you shut down your computer, don't forget to click the little floppy disk icon at the top to save your work."

One student looked up and asked, "Fluffy... what, Ms. Han?"

"The disk icon! You have to click it to save." And then it hit me. 

Oh—these kids were born into a world of USB drives, and now they're saving everything to the cloud. 

For them, the explanation can't start with "It's a 'floppy disk' because you're 'saving,' isn't that intuitive?" It has to start with "A long time ago, there was this thing called a floppy disk that looked like..."

Older generations might say, "But come on, your students are all computer-using Digital Natives (Prensky, 2001), aren't they?" Not really. Even within this generation, real generational gaps exist.



For example, when I want a recipe or reviews of a theme park, I open Google. But when I assigned a "research activity" during social studies, more than half of my class went straight to the YouTube search bar on their chromebooks. For them, YouTube wasn't just a video platform—it was a search platform. "Isn't it easier to scan text back and forth? You can skip the parts you don't need much faster," I asked. But for them, video was simply the more familiar medium.


Another line that struck me as oddly accurate: "Older digital natives still need a big screen for big payments." Unlike '90s-born people who fire up a laptop or desktop to pay for flights or tuition, people born in the 2000s seem perfectly comfortable swiping through major purchases on a phone screen.

And honestly, I'm unmistakably a '90s kid. When my parents were buying a Tesla, they were guided through the entire purchase on the smartphone app—but they just couldn't accept it. They drove to a dealership and signed a paper contract with a human salesperson. My first thought when I heard the story? "Yeah, that's how it should be."

It's been 25 years since Prensky (2001) drew the line between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. In that time, several distinct sub-generations have grown up within the Native category. The gap between kids asking "fluffy?" at a floppy disk icon and me needing a big screen for big purchases is real. Maybe the job of a teacher is to keep acknowledging these gaps and moving between them, again and again.

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