How do you spell "potatoes"?

After spending a funfilled morning choosing plants at a nursery in Forest Hill, LA, "The Nursery Capital of Louisiana", my elderly mother, granddaughter, and I were eating lunch in a well known establishment in LeCompte, LA. During the course of our excellent meal, the young waitress came to the table and asked if I could spell "potatoes" for her; she and a couple of other young people working there needed to know. Without much thought, I spelled it correctly adding the es for the plural ending and made a cute comment about Dan Quayle not knowing to how to correctly add es and not just s to the end of the word. "It's funny you mention that", she said, "someone else told us about him too." Maybe she didn't believe the first person who had spelled the word for her???

Anyway, the other baby boomer customers in the restaurant and I had a quiet chuckle amongst ourselves about her not knowing either how to spell "potatoes" or who Dan Quayle was.

I found this incident most interesting in light of all that I have read about web 2.0 learning and the new literacy and the information age and the generation of digital natives. I could spell "potatoes" with my 1950s and 1960s education even though I am struggling with going up the next rung of the technology ladder and trying to engage my students to learn in a new age. Yet, this young person who was certainly out of high school and probably most adept at using all the new technologies didn't know how to spell a simple English word with perhaps a tricky plural ending but certainly something any baby boomer except Dan Quayle would know. It is just that sometimes it seems that basics are still important and despite all the technology, one must be able to communicate using the written word correctly. Anyway, I persist in trying to absorb all the new ideas in education.