Reflection on the Second Week of Summer – Life Guarding Skills

    While teaching children for decades, I resisted agreeing with colleagues that younger generations were less intelligent than ours when we were their age. Young folks were just modern, smart phone wielding beings.

    Take letter writing, for example. I remember licking three cent stamps and affixing them to the corners of envelopes addressed without zip codes. Who addresses or creates original cards now? Younger generations tweet or text–more efficient and tech savvy.

    Like them, I can use a cell phone.

    Feeling modern, I whipped out my phone to take pictures of a deer walking through Cain Park in Cleveland Heights. The deer crossed the paved path and munched leaves on a wooded hill.

    But modern was the millennial couple who turned their backs and took a selfie with the deer behind them. No doubt they immediately sent the photo to social media.

    No instant send off for me. I preferred the old style of downloading pictures onto my computer, sorting the collection for the best photo, and cropping it before sharing with others.

    A casual remark at this week's Deep Water Fitness class with other retired folks, however, had me questioning whether the difference in generations was just a matter of style.

Our instructor, a retired teacher, handed out kidney shaped Styrofoam boards designed to strengthen seniors' arm muscles. While we pushed the boards back and forth under the water, teenage life guard students gathered by the benches at the other end of the pool.

    Tricia, the svelte, thirty-something life guard instructor, leaned over the edge of the pool at our end and, in a stage whisper to Jim, said “I had to flunk four of them.”

    Jim stopped pushing his board. “Why?” he asked and glanced over his shoulder at the teens.

    Tricia smirked. “They said they didn't know they had to know how to swim.”

    Were the teens going to extend a selfie stick to a drowning victim?

    Call 911 for help?

    Anyone in my generation, at least all in our circle of opened-mouth exercisers, would have the common sense, as teens and as seniors, to know a life guard must be able to swim.