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My 9 year old recently asked me what “stop-drop-and-roll” was and I explained it was if you were on fire and she gave me a really skeptical look and asked, “did that happen a lot when you were a kid?”
About as often as getting stuck in quicksand
Only needs to happen once in a lifetime. Grease fires are more common than you might think.
I imagine someone who wasn’t taught stop drop and roll would just run around panicking. But probably a lot of people who were taught it as well.
I imagine it was also more common when people regularly had fires in their own homes. I bought that same child a pair of pajamas as a toddler that had a million warning tags about keeping them away from open flames because they weren’t flame resistant… Not a problem, I tended to keep my babies away from open flames regardless.
My stepbrother was caught in a house fire as a teenager and he has third degree burn scars over like 60% of his body. Stop, drop and roll probably saved his life.
So it does happen, but it’s always like there’s this person who knows this guy that it happened to and not like it happened to everyone.
Children are fantastic at injuring themselves. My oldest, now grown, really wanted to touch the candle flame. No amount of removing him from the situation and telling him it was hot stopped him from trying to touch the fire. He learned the hard way. If he had panicked I could see him lightning himself on fire.
I omve touched the muffler of my dad’s bike when I was real small. If I remember correctly, he just went “well what did you expect?”(not in an uncaring way, mind) since I was told not to touch it. Truly, what the hell did I expect?
I can still remember the day i learned that the stove is hot. I was about 4 at the time, and i only got a 0.5cm blister on my thumb, but some things seemingly must be experienced to be internalized.
At that point you just gotta remove anything that he could use to make the situation worse, say “Please don’t”, and then let him touch the fire. And hopefully then he’ll learn to listen some.
It happened to me but that would have been the wrong reaction, tearing my overalls off was much more effective
If you are fast enough, getting rid of the burning article is a good approach. if your overalls already started melting into your skin tho, it’s probably not even possible at that point
They’ll drop and stop sooner or later once the running gets boring. Might not roll though.
I don’t think that boring is the operative factor in this situation. But otherwise I would say you are technically correct.
When I was about 10, my dad asked me to light the fireplace. No big deal, I did that all the time at that point. I sat cross legged in front of the fireplace and struck the match like always. I was instantly reminded of the fact that I was wearing these really fuzzy wool plaid pajama pants as I was pretty instantly on fire when a stray spark hut them. All of that “stop drop and roll” training went out the window as I went into a complete panic and started to run. My dad had to tackle me and rip the pants off of me as I was still freaking out.
Great dad work! 100%
It was crazy. I never have worn pants like that again lol.
I’m not surprised; I’m glad that you are able to ‘lol’ about it now.
Getting stopped, dropped and de-panted is either a great or a terrible evening. There is no in-between
No, it happened at a large enough scale in the country of 300M people that we did something about it
The 80s was an incredibly flammable time for clothing fabrics.
Shiiit. Every accelerant in my parents garage had been burned up by the time I was 13. Fire is awesome! I never needed to use stop-drop-and-roll, but I was damn ready to do so if things went south.
There were supposedly lots of nuclear wars in the sixties. Or something.
Yep. I’m old enough to remember doing nuclear attack drills in school a couple of times a school year.
There were 2 different drills, if there was a warning, and we had time we would all file out to a designated hallway, sit down with crossed legs facing the wall, head forward and hands clasped over your head with your eyes closed tight.
If there was no warning you either stayed in your desk, put your head down, closed your eyes tightly, and covered the back of your head with your hands. You could also slide under your desk, close your eyes, and cover your head. Pretty much the exact same drill schools still use today for tornados if you live in a tornado risk area.
As an old medic/firefighter, I cannot stress these drills enough. While they are designed to save lives, and they most definitely can, they also make it much easier to find the bodies because they will all be pretty much centrally located.
Would have been more useful for influencers nowadays.
Amazing
As someone who had to learn cursive in school, I dropped that shit literally as soon as they said we didn’t need to use it anymore. Good riddance.
Yeah, I learned cursive too, but I think it’s weird to see anyone younger than boomers using it.
I have seen the handwriting of some people who complain about “schools not teaching cursive anymore”. I have news to them: I know how to read cursive, their cursive is just crap.
I, too, know how to read cursive. The vast majority of it is unreadable eyedaggers.
The worst part is that it feels like different people were taught different forms of cursive. Lowercase r, f, q, and z is where I noticed most people just making stuff up half of the time
The boomerfication of millennials is a sight to behold.
All young people find all old people quaint, this is nothing like a boomer humor, every generation does this. Boomer humor is more about hating your wife and blaming everything on every other generation.
This is a literal “kid these days” post.
It’s boomer humour to hell.
Maybe you need your peepers to help you see.
Leaning into your age for a joke is not a “kids these days“ post.
It’s millennials complaining kids don’t know cursive.
The same shit actually boomers complained about.
This is literally the opposite of that. It’s making fun of the trope.
They did not complain about it.
It’s really not tho.
Don’t worry, you are heading into all of that as you age. It has ever been so.
Yeah… No. If I hated my wife I would get a divorce.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Separating a marriage after 25+ years is no easy thing. The sheer inertia can be impossible to overcome.
Hate doesn’t happen overnight, you only stay for 25 years with somebody you don’t like because you aren’t being honest with yourself or them.
Or it was illegal to get a divorce.
It’s never been illegal to get a divorce in the US. You may be thinking specifically of At-Fault Divorce which was the norm in the US until the 60s… when most boomers were in their 20s or younger.
Here’s another one I spotted recently. People comparing html to “years of experience in CIA” just felt funny.
HTML is not hard. Someone who says “HTML codes” won’t know anything past the basics.
“Dear fellas, I can’t believe how fast things move on the outside. I saw an automobile once when I was a kid, but now they’re everywhere. The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.” - Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption.
Eh, it’s more like we’re leaning into being old-heads now for the lols. Millennials don’t do very many things without any ironic undertones.
Idk man.
I’ve never seen millennials have an allergic reaction to a number before.
What?
6
…
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7
Yes, that’s 42, and?
Gen Alpha did not invent funny numbers. Every single generation has had some version of random meaningless silliness.
Our funny numbers have quite deep meaning, thank you very much.
And boomer millennials have an allergic reaction to 6………………7.
Because it’s a reminder they’re not cool anymore. And what’s IT isn’t up to them to decide anymore.
That has not been my observation. I’ve seen plenty of millennials join in, I’ve never seen one “have an allergic reaction”. I think you’re making that up.
So, you’ve seen Boomers put down Gen-X, and Gen-X get in millennials, and now you’re seeing millennials talking about the kids…
But you, you’ll be immune!
Gotta say, this warning helped me accept it. The kids will be fine and one day I’ll be able to tell them a 19 hundreds story where I wore a Tamagotchi on my belt, as was the style at the time… (Continues)
‘Family Guy’ did it first!
This is why I say that “The kids will be alright.” For fucks sake every generation has said that the younger ones will never make it. The kids today are the smartest ever not the dumbest. They just don’t value the same things that we did and honestly, great. Leave my crap alone, figure out your own crap.
In January 2026, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. His message was clear: “Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.”
What the data actually says is that measured skills like reading comprehension, math performance, sustained attention, and writing quality may be slipping or not improving. It also suggests that a heavy, poorly controlled digital environment can make it harder to learn and retain what the school is trying to teach.
https://www.wearethemighty.com/feature/gen-z-intelligence-study/
It’s not like there’s no cause for concern, but it seems like it’s mostly just that we need to limit screen time a little.
Fucking kids these days, no work ethic like we had/have. They want everything now instead of working for it.
They want their TikTok
Mr Beast coin for nothing and non binary chicks for free
Everything on this list is still being taught to my kids (NZ). Phonics is still the best way to teach reading. Every new stupid fad dies out and they come back to phonics.
I’m pretty surprised they’re learning cursive though. Wtf
I believe cursive is thaught because the hand makes repetitive movements that way, not because of how it looks. But since we barely need to write anything lengthy anymore i guess efficient writing isn’t worth that much more than inefficient writing.
I don’t think making writing beautiful and celebrating penmanship is the worst thing. I’m all for cursive
Phonics would make sense in a language that’s phonetic. But English is not phonetic, so teaching them it as if it is, and then teaching them “tricky” words and that all words are fake, and making them read nonsense words to test their phonics, is stupid
English is not phonetic
Like hell it’s not. Just because gh has more than one pronunciation doesn’t mean it’s not phonetic.
I thought someone was was ploughing the dough, tough guy.
From a semantic perspective that argument is badly framed but I can intuit your point using my foundational skills of reasoning. In the same fashion, the reason I can guess what words like phantasmagoria and phosphaturia sound like and tell them apart is because the written English language is still representational enough that you can develop common sense abilities and learn additional rules and exceptions from there. Every single word in your comment follows a
rulepattern that another common word follows.Cueing is poorly taught; the whole language approach makes no sense on its own. Why would you remove the tools for assembling the pronunciation of a multisyllabic word and instead suggest guessing at it? You wouldn’t. Nobody studying this is suggesting you throw phonics out in entirety, even the cueing advocates that don’t believe in dyslexia who sound suspiciously like they have dyslexia.
What does cueing mean in this context?
“Three Cueing” is the new method of teaching that tells the kid to just guess what things mean, without even using contextual clues to do so.
Except that the alternative method, the “whole word” approach, seems to have way worse outcomes.
I’ve been in & out of institutions thanks to my addiction to phonics. School got me hooked on the stuff.
There’s a placebo available that cures it, apparently.
Not only cursive and calligraphy, but we rode our bicycles until we were lost and without a mobile phone.
I learned cursive and then never used it again. I learned it to sign my name, but you don’t even need cursive to sign your name because everybody’s signature is just a big scribble anyway.
Why is Stop Drop and Roll no longer being taught?
When they shoot, look cute & scoot
Look cute, shoot & scoot.
FTFY
Far less open flames around your average household. Less fireplaces being used, electricity is far more available so it replaced candles, you don’t see wood stoves pretty much ever anymore, and even gas stoves are being replaced with electric ones nowadays.
Fire used to be far more prevalent. Prometheus would be sad, at least until he discovers the fire emoji and tinder.
Plus flame-retardants in children’s clothes and furniture are way more common than they used to be. So kids are seeing fewer fires, and when they do, they’re less likely to get lit up.
Exactly, thought of that after finishing the comment. That, fire extinguishers, houses being less prone to fires, fire and electric code updates, smoke and fire alarms being so prevalent now, there are fewer and fewer children going up in flames nowadays.
deleted by creator
Slop, Drop and Scroll.
As a 56 year old - I write cursive fine enough to barely get what the letters are. My signature however is exactly the same way - mostly rushed and random. Hoping for that someday challenge.
They left out the duck and cover nuclear drills, analog black and white tv and rotary phones. Oh, and most house didn’t have air conditioning.
Edit: Oops. Never mind i was thinking of my childhood in the 60’s.
I didn’t have AC until I was almost an adult in the late 90s. It regularly gets to be about body temperature outside, with humidity, in the summer. Heat waves can sometimes be 110f/43c. When I first lived in a home with AC I was freezing and had to wear long sleeves all summer. I have since acclimated, but my wife and kids who have always had AC freak out if it gets to be 80f/27c.
A lot of public spaces in the usa set their air conditioning to bone chilling levels. Especially restaurants and hospitals.
The hospitals argue it helps control bacteria growth, and the restaurants do it because the kitchen becomes a sauna in the summer.
Hospitals are right, and there are additional factors. Most pathogens really like human body temperature, so keeping the difference high enough between rooms and bodies helps cutting their growth rate (and it’s a quadratic correlation, not linear). Also, lower room temperatures have shown to be preferable to reduce patient mortality in general - The body doesn’t have to do tons of work to cool you down, which is additional strain on the circulatory system and reduces available water due to sweating. It’s no coincidence that mortality rates rise dramatically during heat waves.
I got AC when I moved out, prior to that I lived in an old single-wide trailer in the middle of a field… It was always hot but being near the GA/FL line didn’t help lol.
Did your home have awnings? I have heard that just keeping the sun off is most of the work.
None at all, it was a pretty bare bones trailer, we had to replace a lot of flooring but that was more just adding a layer of wood we pulled out of an abandoned house. So pretty much a metal box in a big open field.
Well, I’m glad you made it out of there.
We all come from somewhere, sometimes I catch myself thinking fondly of the simplicity of the time, though ultimately I’m glad I moved out as soon as I could.
I’m in this post and I don’t like it.
Hold up. You write? By hand? At work? In 2026? And you’re not jailed for that?
You were never tutored in analogue calculations. Analog doesn’t mean “everything that’s not digital”.
“If the big hand is on the three and the little hand is on the five, what time is it?”
what a dunk lol
fuck cursive, bullshit ass writing method.
A Day Later: Some ableist ass fuckin discourse goin’ on here now…
It’s faster for writing English, no?
If you write slowly sure, but print can be pretty quick to write.
sure, if you don’t have any language or learning disabilities…
I had to look this up…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive
Wikipedia mentions “in contrast to block letters”, which seems to be essentially all caps. Is that how you usually write? in all caps?
You can write lower case block letters. They look like most of the ones I’m typing now.
👍🏼 Indeed. I was going by this passage from the Wikipedia article
Block letters may also be used as to refer to block capitals, which means writing in all capital letters or in large and small capital letters
But at this point why not join the letters then? it seems like an unnecessary hurdle
I’m sure I’ve seen this discussion on lemmy at some point before. Basically there are different terms for writing and not all countries/regions use them to mean the same thing. Some people say “joined up letters” to mean cursive, some people use it to mean connecting what are basically printed letters, and others have never heard that phrase and think that casually connecting some letters is still printing because it’s not “formal” cursive.
For example, I learned this system of cursive and although I connect some letters when writing these days (although not all of them) and some of the letters are similar to printing, I definitely would never write (eg) a capital G or I like that anymore, or put 3 humps in my m and 2 in my n. I only heard “joined up writing” much more recently and I thought it would look like this or this, which is a lot closer to how I write than a cursive style.
the system of cursive letters you linked is what im referring to as a “bullshit ass writing system”.
Yeah several of those letters seem pretty inefficient. I stopped using cursive as soon as the teachers didn’t care (I think 4th grade?), but I wonder if we’d been taught a better system if I would’ve kept at it. My handwriting always was kind of a mess though.
Yeah it was particularly frustrating being taught how to write in cursive and how to touch type in the same school year… especially when no one could give me a straight answer as to why I had to keep banging my head against the handwriting of all kinds when it was clear I could do the work just fine if i could just fucking type the thing.
Block letters aren’t all caps. You’re probably reading this in block letters
aha ! Ok I see. So the person above uses small print letters the same way they appear on a computer screen? wouldn’t this be super inconvenient and slow?
all hand writing is inconvenient and slow for me
how come? are you handicapped? me, I’ve got a tendon problem in my wrist and I can’t hold a mouse for very long without experiencing intense pain. But writing is fine
For me it’s because I can type 90+ wpm and I cannot come even remotely close to that with a pen.
It is an attention/cognitive issue. Writing by hand period feels like trying to think and process through molasses and becomes unbearable almost instantly.
alright, not familiar with that. Thanks for sharing
I write cursive and block at about the same speed I think
Alright
Block letters would be capitals and small letters.
Architectural lettering, yes.
No?
Cursive (also known as joined-up writing)
Block letters … in which the letters are individual glyphs, with no joining.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-hand-is-better-for-memory-and-learning/
Cursive teaches you fine motor skills and improves hand strength.
No keyboard feels as good as a fine pen.
Not all hand writing is cursive
What does this have to do with cursive writing? It’s just talking about handwriting in general
If you wanna do a lot of handwriting, cursive comes out on top - it’s faster and less straining for your hand because you can use continuous motion. (and this comes from someone who had cramps in his hand in school because of the amount of writing - i can’t even imagine having to write so much again while NOT using cursive).
not all people have the same ability as you.
Your comment makes no sense to me.
Are you saying that, because some people can’t write cursive, no one should?
That’s like saying because some people need wheelchairs we should outlaw walking.
At no point did I advocate for anything other than my opinion that cursive is a stupid, bullshit ass writing method. And that telling me about the benefits of it is kind of like telling a wheelchair user the benefits of stairs. If we’re going with that analogy.
