What "old skills" students have lost

[Parasaurolophus]

Oh! Sharpening a knife!

[Wahoo Redux]

Polishing shoes...at least I assume.

My parents taught me to polish me shows using bootblack, a brush, and a rag.

Do they still hand wax cars?

Also, we were excellent swordsmen in my day (or is it swordspeople now?).  We solved all our social problems with duels to the death or until a facial feature was lopped off.

[RatGuy]

I hope OP put "old skills" in scare quotes because some of the skills aren't really that old. I mean, I used the card catalog in undergrad, but my first year of grad school (1999) at a different university, the research methods class for first year MA students contained a "we're transitioning to digital card catalog" lesson. I hope that makes me "old" and not just old.

Meanwhile. I'd be happy just for my current crop of students to learn how to rotate a PDF for viewing (or print out the document) or attach a file to an email or similar program.

[mamselle]

The cultivation if curiosity.

Whining about difficulty, and flipping the responsibility for investigating the mysterious over to an older adult or instructor, are too tempting as competing strategies, and they become reflexive responses,  viz-a-vis "owning" a question and delighting in its exploration as an enchanting process.

M.

[the_geneticist]

Riding a horse.
Churning butter.
Milking a cow.
Butchering chickens.
Putting on a corset.
Hitching a wagon.
...the list goes on and on.

Hey, I can do all of those except the hitching a wagon.

How about:
Writing a professional and polite email with a proper subject, salutation, brief message, and contact information.

[clean]

Writing in words rather than text speak.

Oh, the proper placement of a $ 
($100 rather than 100$)

And dont get me started on .99 cents for 99 cents or $.99! 

[marshwiggle]

I hope OP put "old skills" in scare quotes because some of the skills aren't really that old.

Yes, my particular interest was in ones that have basically disappeared in a generation.

Drive a stick shift

Happy to say, all 3 of my millenial/GenZ kids *can (and do) drive stick. (Two of my cars, including my current one, were manual so they had to if they wanted to borrow it!)


*(When they were learning to drive there was still one driving school here giving lessons on a manual. They all took their lessons there. I don't know if that's even an option anymore.)

[the_geneticist]

It used to be that you needed to learn how to drive a stick just in case you ever needed to rent a vehicle.  Most rentals were stick shift in the 70s & 80s, especially if you needed to rent a truck.

I'm happy to say that my dad taught me how to drive a stick & I'm glad he did!

[Wahoo Redux]

At some point in adulthood I experienced a switch in attitude toward my poor parents.  We had a lot of friction when I was an adolescent and young adult, and part of this was my predictable North American bratty ingratitude toward my elders----but a huge amount of our headbutting was because things were changing and my parents really didn't like it.

Mom was born in 1931 and dad was born in 1936.  They came of age in the wake of World War II during the "Eisenhower Era" and they were not good with unfamiliar clothes, hairstyles, music, TV, attitudes toward war, animals, food, lifestyles, and a host of other subjective and often unimportant things (except the attitudes towards war, animals and lifestyles). 

Even with the many continuities in American life, there were enough changes that my poor parents were flustered and angry, and I think they were confused.  At some point I started to feel sorry for them. I think they were very typical of that generation.

My mother still rages against computers although she has come around regarding TV.

[marshwiggle]

It used to be that you needed to learn how to drive a stick just in case you ever needed to rent a vehicle.  Most rentals were stick shift in the 70s & 80s, especially if you needed to rent a truck.

I'm happy to say that my dad taught me how to drive a stick & I'm glad he did!

Still is a thing in many other countries.

[EdnaMode]

Being able to do basic math and fractions without a calculator. We were talking about standard fastener sizes and I remember asking something like "What's half of 3/4?" and I was fully expecting someone to immediately reply with 3/8. Crickets. Then they pulled out their calculators. And when they do that, they end up with a decimal and can't recognize that decimal in fraction form.

[jimbogumbo]

Writing in words rather than text speak.

Oh, the proper placement of a $ 
($100 rather than 100$)

And dont get me started on .99 cents for 99 cents or $.99!

I've been "documenting" the .99 cents thing all across the country since 1981. Every state in newspaper ads, on storefronts, etc.  In a huge ad in USA Today in the mid eighties. Heck, several times in Seinfeld episodes in signs displayed at the fruit stand or bodega.

How do you feel about $1.59¢ ?

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

Basic car maintenance. Change the oil, rotate the tires, change the air filter, change spark plugs, check/change the battery, refill washer fluid, etc.

[jerseyjay]

At the risk of stepping into it again, here is a list of some other things that many students do not know how to do:
Pay a toll (i.e., where you have to stop and hand the toll collector money);
Pay a bill (i.e., writing a check or money order and sending it in via the mail);
Balance a checkbook;
Do anything with a checkbook;
Write out their points for a long-distance call because long distance was expensive (now, of course, the writing, the dialing, and the talking on the phone are increasingly rare)
Read a TV-Guide;
Use a beeper;
Fill a fountain pen with ink;
Use a slide-rule
Use a dictionary;
Read Shakespeare and the KJV and recognize references from them;
Decline and conjugate Latin;
Sending telegraphs.

However, I would say that there are generally three types of skills that students do not have
1. Things that are actually still useful but increasing numbers of people do not have. These include: using a manual transmission (because manual transmissions are still standard in much of the world; read handwriting (because much of the history of written documents are written incursive); use the postal system (not just because there are some dinosaur professors who require it, but because it can come in handy); polishing shoes and tying a tie (because, well, they might need to dress up someday); use a dictionary (because sometimes you need to dwelve into a word's meaning in a way that googling it won't do). I would say these are actually "cultural capital" that many people do not need but serve as an invisible line of social demarcation.

2. Things that make me sad people do not know how to do but which probably do not matter. I would put using a card catalog on this list: I think that much has been lost with the transition away from cards (because the cards contain more information than a database entry).

3. Things that might make me nostalgic but really are just obsolete. Like beepers and flip-phones and punch-cards and sending telegraphs.

Of course the bounds between these three are fluid and subjective.

[kaysixteen]

Ok, so what we gots here is a wide mix of obsolete stuff and useful skills that these kids need to have, some of which directly intersect their interactions with professors/ teachers.... so what do you all think is our responsibility to teach these types of things, when we encounter ignorance thereof?

One more thing I have to add, in this regar: taking competent notes, or any notes.