If you haven't been inside a high school in 5+ years, you will be shocked

When I was in high school, we had one computer in the library. It was the size of a refrigerator, and the monitor was maybe 10 inches diagonally.<br><br>In the classroom, we had nothing but chalkboards. I never remember even seeing a whiteboard. The teacher stood in the front of the room and wrote on the chalkboard with chalk and we took notes with pen and paper. We didn't have calculators, we did calculations by hand.<br><br>One time we were able to go into the computer lab and play Oregon Trail. That was the only time I used a computer in school.<br><br>When I graduated in 1971, computer science was brand new, but I was able to take a course. The "computer" was really just a dumb terminal connected to a mainframe at our state university over telephone lines, IIRC. We wrote code in Fortran. I remember one assignment where we had to write a program that would play a game of tic-tac-toe. I think I spent 5 hours in the lab to get it to work.<br><br>Fast forward to today. My son is a senior in high school. The school he goes to, I think it might be one of the largest in the United States and definitely one of the wealthiest. I think he told me they have a $150 million budget. <br><br>All the kids get issued laptops. The classroom is equipped with a smart board, a large projection screen, overhead cameras with microphones. I think every classroom in the school has this. My son said he has two classes that still have a chalkboard. The teachers still use chalk to write on it.<br><br>One time when my son was a freshman, we stopped by the school so I could see what it was like. They were in the middle of a lesson with one of his teachers doing a demonstration on the smart board. My son had a lot of catching up to do so he went to the library to get it done. And it was huge. It occupied the entire third floor of the school. It had a bunch of computers, printers, digital media like DVDs, and I think there were some 3D printers. There were a few classrooms on the outside edges of the floor for various subjects, but the main thing was the library. <br><br>I thought this would be a good story for anyone that's been out of high school for a while.