do)—never to question authority, always presuming that they knew what they were talking about. They were the teachers, we the students, we followed, and this conditioned reflex went beyond the classroom. To my generation, learning was a simple process, a fixed, predetermined structure involving parents, teachers, the classroom, books and more books. (In a parents’ question- naire, my elementary school asked my mother how many sets of encyclopedia we had at home, and what kind. Nothing less than Britannica would do.) To my kids’ generation, learning is one big fluid motion— borderless, bound by neither time nor place. This is the generation to whom everything is only a click away—TV, books, the Internet (especially YouTube), PlayStation, iPod, animé , celebrities/icons. The mall is their comfort zone, indeed their learning zone. Wikipedia is their encyclopedia—that bad. Where is the classroom teacher’s place in this ethereal universe? Good question. To my generation of journalists, the newsroom was one sacred totem pole, and we, the thumbsuckers fresh out of school, were at the bottom. At 23, I was for months already the acting editor of the Family Journal, the precursor of today’s Lifestyle section, when Joe Luna summoned me to an interview for the position of editor. He looked at my file, then threw me a stare and a frown—“What makes you think you’re qualified to ‘close’ the Family Journal?” he asked in his Syracusan accent.
Mustering enough bravado, I replied, “Because I’ve been with my family for almost 24 years already.”
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