Wednesday, April 26, 2006

passing notes is my favorite pass time i can't wait to find a girl to pass mine to

Remember passing notes in junior high? Remeber how you had to fold them up all cleverly so you secured them with a triangular fold in the corner? And someone would give you a note folded differently and you were all agog and aghast to figure out how they folded it nad would they be mad if you stole their folding technique? And you were just plain excited to get the note at all, regardless of what was in it.

We had such a sense of manuscript writing as teenagers that is sadly lost today. Would that I had saved all of my notes from high school. Think of what a researcher in an archives or manuscript library could and would do with our notes. What does this tell us about society?

I suspect the art of passing notes is gone now, overtaken by text messaging. Kids these days lack all creativity.

11 Comments:

Blogger Ann said...

I can remember my kids folding up notes like that and getting a kick out of it--that some things have never changed. Remember those little folded type things that you would pick a number, open the flap and reveal a question?

What the heck were those things called? This is going to drive me crazy until I figure it out!

9:48 PM  
Blogger Ann said...

COOTIE CATCHER! Not to be confused with the ever popular cootchee catcher...

:o)

Ann

9:55 PM  
Blogger dragon knitter said...

hah, i got creative with my "cootie catcher". i made one, and coated it with about 10 coats of tempera paint & shellac, and made it into a salt cellar for my grandmother (she collected s&p shakers). i even carved an itty bitty spoon out of some lumber scraps my dad had!

i didn't pass notes much in jr high, i wasn't terribly popular, sigh

10:10 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wanna hear something crazy? I DID save all my notes. Most of them, anyway. I have a big bag of them along with all my Pen Pal letters, cards from friends, even a "book" of insulting drawings of my brother that my friend and I made when we were about 8.

Every time I try to do a big spring clean-and-purge, I find the box and end up looking through it for the rest of the day. My friends and I were prolific. It's amazing how much we had to say to each other, even if we weren't saying much of anything at all.

11:44 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I borrowed a room a couple years ago from a 12 year old girl (I paid rent to her Mom, she was sleeping at her Dad's at the time). She had a bag of notes; I, uh, read them, because I was bored. The art is not lost, neither of the note writing, nor folding.

1:57 AM  
Blogger jodi said...

I have to admit that in class last night I passed a note, although it was the plain old ordinary not-folded sort. And the passee altered the note and passed it back. I don't know much about kids these days (but I'm practicing throwing the phrase "kids these days" into conversations randomly so as to have it come naturally later on when I'm an old fogey) but um. . . some adults are juvenile enough to still pass notes in class. We're grad students. Oh, and I'm 34.

7:53 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

When I was in high school, my best friend and I had a notebook that we passed back and forth. We lost the joy of all the neat folds (and I knew some great ones - arrows and rocketships and hearts, oh my!), but we had a wonderful written history of our friendship. I think she ended up with it when it was full...she'd better still have it!

12:21 PM  
Blogger Melissa said...

A friend and I were just talking about those "cootie catcher" things the other day. We took my son and her daughter to Wendy's and the kids meal came with a triangle and a plastic goal post. Remember when you used to fold a piece of paper into a triangle and play desk football? She didn't, but I remember doing that in High School.

Notes from high school...wow it would be interesting to read them now.

1:09 PM  
Blogger Karida said...

ahh, the lost art of correspondence. when are you gonna be in town again? i'm done with school stress and ready to be a functional friend now. i even got me a blog, http://mulptiplecraftgasm.blogspot.com. btw, your ruffly socks are adorable and inspire me to make similarly girly footwear.

5:18 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

We called them fortune tellers, and my brother and I used to tell fortunes in the Uptown Bar in Minneapolis when we were little kids. "Five cents for a bad one and a quarter for a good one." Seriously, we always made at least $5 before the waitresses got mad.

I teach fifth grade. Students still pass notes. Just yesterday Joshua passed a note to Kianna explaining why he'd broken up with her and how he'd changed his mind and he wanted to call her again...

3:49 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

In high school, my friend Dawn and I would fold our notes into these little triangles. And we wrote them in cipher, so that, should they fall into the wrong hands, the finder would have to do at least a little work to read them. Because it would be a dire emergency if someone read about our plans for the weekend and how terribly boring Biology class was.

My wife teaches 8th grade history, and she just showed me a note she confiscated this week, so they're still passing them. Although, man, that note was a LOT more explicit than any of the ones we ever wrote!

4:52 PM  

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