I’ve never been very good at taking tests.

My A.D.D. usually kicked in after the fourth of fifth question and I had more fun daydreaming about how I could land a plane if the pilot suffered a stroke, saving hundreds of beholden passengers, than plodding through a list of multiple choice questions.

This all changed in the summer of 1992. At the time I was a Freshman in high school, I got my hands on a fancy new wristwatch with a built-in calculator and ‘notes’ section. Typing on this thing was unbelievable: you would have to press one key three times to reach the desired letter.

But, being the nerd that I am, I loved my futuristic watch-computer-thing. Though I didn’t realize its full potential until I started cheating on tests.

I had Math class during the 4th period on Wednesdays, right after lunch; a friend had the same class an hour earlier. I convinced my compadre to enter into a business deal with me: I would supply him with 10 Blow Pops a week (they were selling for a quarter a pop in the underground High School candy market) and he would steal a copy of the weekly math test for me.

Test in hand, I would spend my entire lunch hour figuring out the answers to the multiple choice questions and entering them into my wristwatch. So instead of the time displayed on my watch, I saw something like this: ABCDAACDDDAD.

And whadya know, I went from F’s and D’s in Math to 100 percent test scores week after week.

Eventually I got caught. They took away my watch and I was suspended from school for three days. Although the principal lowered my sentence because he “was impressed by my creativity,” specifically when it came to technology.

So why am I writing about this now? A few years, and plenty of suspensions later (for unrelated offenses), I graduated high school and headed off to college—I was the class of 1999.

In a post I wrote for the Bits Blog on Tuesday, the class of 2014 will enter college at the end of this summer and according to a Beloit College survey, not only are this fresh crop of kids choosing to forgo wristwatches, but the mere act of pointing to your wrist to ask someone the time is completely alien to them.

The students entering the class of 2014, according to the survey, also don’t use e-mail because it’s too slow, have “never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone,” and say that the band Nirvana is only available on classic oldies station.

(There isn’t a universal symbol to ask for the time, the kids these days don’t need to ask anything as they all have cell phones with clocks front and center, 24-7.)

I’m not saying all this to lament the wristwatch, or any other technology; I traded in my watch for a smartphone many years ago. It’s just fascinating to watch society transition before our eyes in a digital age.

And who knows, when the class of 2014 graduates and the class of 2018 enters the halls of Beloit College, they will probably equate the swipe of unlocking an iPhone to my generation pointing to their wrist to ask the time. And by then I bet the class of 2018 will also say Justin Bieber is only available on classic oldies station.

Photo by arthurohm