Recently, my seven year old daughter asked my husband to teach her how to build a computer. I thought that was a wonderful idea, and I was so proud that she was ready to take on the task at such a young age. However, when I realized that I wasn't actually interested in participating, I started to think about how excited I was just a few weeks back when my three year old was doing an STEM activity where they were doing age appropriate "programming" activities. Then I remembered the kind of funny story of the first time that I opened a computer and why I never wanted to do it again after that. Ha ha!
It was a Tuesday. I had just completed the first semester of my Information Technology course in college, and I had walked into the second semester portion of the class... the hands on portion. I was wearing a cute little pleated green skirt with beaded embellishment, a white blouse and tan sandals. My hair was in a high bun because I had a dance class later that day. I say all this to explain that this memory is vivid even though it happened a good number of years ago. I had aced the previous class, and this was going to be a breeze... I thought. Y'all. When I unscrewed the back to open the computer there was so much dust. I mean, like SO MUCH Dust. I continued with the class and followed each step the instructor gave with utter disgust until it was over.
After that class ended then I skipped my next class to go to the Registrar and drop that class to replace it with something else (C Programming) and I changed my minor to Statistical Programming. There is a long story concerning equity regarding that minor that I'm not going to discuss in this post, but my major was Mathematics. So, Statistical Programming seemed like a relevant minor to the coursework that I was already doing.
My husband, who was a close friend at the time, thought this was so funny. Even though I loved tech and was very interested in (what I knew so far about) engineering, I wasn't going to work and getting dirty every single day. My hardware journey had ended just that quick. Lol! I am proud of both of my girls and excited that they are interested in science and technology at such young ages. I am also extremely happy to be married to The Tech Gentleman so that he can teach them all of the hardware related things that I don't like to do!
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