So I may be growing old...or simply just older???

I found my first gray hair the other day.  Yes, that's what I said.  I, Miss I am only thirty two and I am still so young, found my first gray hair.  I was just in the bathroom combing out my hair and I saw it sticking up.  It was one of those darned baby hairs.  You ladies with kids know what I am talking about.  All of those silly tiny hairs that seem to grow all over your head again after you have a baby?  Yeah, one of those.  But this one was coarse...and of a surprisingly light colour.  I yelled out to Kev, saying "HONEY!  I just found a GRAY HAIR!" in my most tragic of voices.  I forced him to come and look at it.  He swore that it was blonde, but I'm still not so sure.  I even laid it on a piece of black fabric trying to figure it out...I'm pretty sure it was gray.  Oh well...gray it is.  At least I have a good hairdresser...I think I may need to take a trip to see her, and soon.

Speaking of old, I was talking with my grade 9 students last week and teaching them about writing an autobiography.  We were working on life maps to create an outline and I said something about them being born on such and such a date in the year...and then I paused.  "What year were you guys born?"  I asked innocently.  "Oh, 1997 Mrs. Sowerby."  Oy.  Yep, 1997, the year I was starting my final year of high school.  I have finally reached that point where I could actually, OFFICIALLY be the parent of one of my students.  Wow.  I remember thinking about that day and how it would never come, how I would always be one of the young ones on staff.  Well, I seem to move further from that all of the time!  I can't believe it.  I am old enough to be my students' mother.  I remember when I was just a few years older than my oldest student.  With this passage of time, however, has come a much more confident and prepared teacher, so I am glad for that.  Still, I'm old enough to be my students' mother.  Yikes.

My students are also now officially young people of a technology age that is vastly different than that I grew up in.  I am now able to tell stories about the "olden times" when we didn't have the Internet.  Yep, that's right, we didn't have the Internet.  Whenever I mention something like this they look at me like they can't quite grasp what that would even be like.  No Internet?  No Facebook or YouTube?  You mean the teachers actually had to find clips from movies, cue them up to the right spot, push play on the VCR and then push stop.  What IS a VCR Mrs. Sowerby?  How did you ever do research?  If your teacher assigned you a paper, where did you look for your information?  What?  You mean you used the library for something besides sitting at the computers IN the library?  Huh?  You didn't even HAVE computers in your library???  Oh, the vast differences.  I have to admit though, as a teacher, I sing my hallelujahs regarding the changes in technology.  I love having it at my fingertips and being able to easily access a video clip or a sound bite that goes along with what I'm saying.  I love that I don't have to use paper for EVERYTHING because I have a projector that connects to my computer.  We can make our lessons come more alive.  We can easily support our points with various information that we search out.

I guess I am growing old, but it is interesting to look back on my life thus far and see even the amazing changes that have taken place throughout it.  As for that gray hair?  I think I'll be calling Jasmine my hair dresser soon!