Evidence that yes, we are currently living in the future:

One of my Calculus students injured himself pretty badly (broke his foot/leg) over the last break, and hasn’t been able to return to school. He is currently limping around his house with an old man walker. Instead of getting behind in all his classes, he decided that he is going to Skype into every single one of his classes. Every day, I set up the computer facing the board, call him on Skype, say hi, then start the class. He watches what’s going on and sometimes even asks questions. Though not the same as being there, he is keeping up with Calculus class…. from a few thousand kilometers away in Saudi Arabia. Every time I call him up at the beginning of the class I get this mental image of me teaching in 20 years to a room full of computer screens facing my direction. I’m not too sure how I will scold them for talking to their neighbor, but maybe that wont be a problem because their neighbor will actually be thousands of kilometers away.

And then this past Sunday, as part of our “Spirit Week” festivities, we had a Wii competition in our gym. So instead of playing real sports in the place that we are supposed to play real sports, we set up huge screens with projectors and had three Wiis going at once, one for a boxing tournament, one for a ping pong tournament, and one for Dance Dance Revolution. There were boxing gloves and a ping pong table literally in the next room over, but instead of doing that we watched people wave around white wands, which made digital people on the screen play sports that we didn’t really feel like playing in real life. Needless to say, it was very fun. The future is fun.

I can’t even imagine the type of crazy things that our kids will be doing when the future (part 2) comes around.