into idots.  We were with a neighbor last night who teaches 8th grade.  She was telling us how horrible her students performed on the spelling and punctuation portion of a standardized test.

  Spell check and instant messaging have literally wiped out essential life long skills 

in our children

 which used to be embedded in all of us.

  Have you ever read one of their I'Ms?

TTYL means

talk you later

 They don't even bother with the words,

let alone the punctuation. 

 I will talk to you later.

I must admit

in order to avoid loosing my readers because my posts are way too long

I have resorted to centering everything

using spacing to fool you into thinking,

 this is not as long as it truly is

never end a sentence with a preposition

and employ a lack of punctuation to trick you into thinking

 it won't be much work to read

trust me

I know my punctuation inside and out

my Dad was an English teacher and he drilled the rules into me daily

that's my excuse

and that's another story

I'm sure our kids have their own excuses

but unfortunately

they don't know the rules

the proper way to speak and punctuate

is no longer second nature to most of them

and their spelling is atrocious

I was going to hit the spell check on that last word

atrocious,

but I actually spelled it correctly?

Admittedly 

I could not live without spell check

 and I hate

that the comments and the threads

on thoughts.com

do not have this particular marvelous feature that I can't live without

although, I did hear the special feature was on it's way

another story

Another by product of this digital degenerating generation

is

 our children do not memorize phone numbers

they have them programmed in their cell phones

no need to commit any of those tedious numbers to memory anymore

they even have trouble keeping track of their multiple passwords

another story

They can not make a phone call unless they have their own phones

and

if their battery runs down

borrowing another phone is a waste of time

Our kids can not even navigate their way around a library

one of my all time favorite places on this earth

because of the Internet

they have no idea what a library has to offer other than books

human beings who actually work there,

are more than willing to go out of their way to help you locate material

 another story for another post

gtg

ttyl

I have to go find my phone charger so I can call my daughter