What does Print it mean?

It is helpful to have a daughter who is a freshman at a large university who asks me for help as she tries to interpret college. The question this morning helped to remind me that there are context shifts taking place. The question was whether her printer would print on both sides. Hmmm, well no it does not, but why does it need to? "Well Dad, my professor has given us lot's of documents we are supposed to print, and if printed it will be a lot of pages". OK, but you have the documents right. "Yes they are word docs". So could you read them on your laptop? "Yes, I would rather do that". So the solution was to assure my daughter that it was OK to just read the docs on her laptop and that her professor probably hasn't changed their syllabus or thinking to clarify that printing is not the only option for reading documents anymore.

A simple example that helps to remind us that freshman are very confused and are totally focused on trying to figure out what and how these professors want them to perform. This print example reinforces that new college students today do not come from a print mentality. In fact my daughter also told me she was taking her "Intro To Computer" book back for a full refund because it was nothing more then a bunch computer screen printouts. She already knew that if you needed examples of various computer applications you could get them on YouTube. I think that saved me $75 bucks.