Old School - New Technology

 

One of my grandchildren is doing Key Stage 2 Standard Assessment Tests, otherwise known as KS2 SATs exams this week. He’s on track, so I’m sure he will be fine. He likes to do his homework at my house, which is fine. In recent weeks, the homework has been SATs practice papers for Maths and English and a list of spellings to learn. Maths is good. He is a whizz at maths, except anything to do with mixed fractions. Not my forte, either, better ask Grandad. I’m good at passing the buck. I’m good at English. At least, as a published writer I thought I was until I encountered an English paper he needed a little help with. Thank you, Google, for topping up my old brain with ‘subordinate clauses’, ‘subordinating conjunctions’, ‘relative pronouns’ and many more terms new to me that I tried to quickly learn. I decided that although I have qualifications to prove I am (was) educated to a certain level, I finished up feeling a bit thick, and he’s not quite eleven.

He attends one of my old schools. I had five different primary schools due to my father’s job in the licenced trade taking the family to various towns. As a child, I was very unhappy at this school and failed to settle in. These days, someone would pick up on that and show care and encouragement to a child, especially coming in new to the unfamiliar. For all that I once hated it, I’m at home there, now. I look after the infant’s library as a volunteer. Previously, I worked there. I would be out of my depth now. Methods have changed so much, even since my own children’s primary school years. I suppose we must move with the times.

My grandson will go to high school in September, where things will be even less familiar to me. That’s if he tells me anything about it, of course.

In my day, the Eleven Plus created the great divide between Grammar or Secondary school, and made some of the exam failures, like me, feel disappointed and even worthless. The KS2 SATs won’t be responsible for anything like that, thank goodness.

When I was at secondary school, we had to use fountain pens in English. Handwriting was encouraged to be cursive and perfectly formed, something to take pride in. Untidy writers were made to practice on specially lined paper. Sometimes, English homework would be to learn a poem by heart. It would be recited in class. No escape.

My grandson has developed his own handwriting style, as we all do. At school, some work, including writing is done on an iPad. Modern technology is the way forward and as things change and improve, we must keep up. I am ‘old school’ in my ways and in my thinking, but coping, I think, in this digital age.

My poem is not intended to sound cynical, but more of a sigh to what has passed never to return. A comparison from then to now.

An Alternative Education

The 3Rs soon to be redundant
Computer-led kids will be abundant
With all information mega-quick,
It only takes a scroll down and click.
No need for any conversation
Included in their education.

Last year’s reception class have all gone
And taken a leap up to Year One
To drag sticky fingers on iPad screens
And work out what technology means.
Will this be their basic foundation
Instead of formal education?

Numeracy, or let’s call it Maths
Has rules to follow specific paths
Beginning with learning how to count
Then adding up and sharing out.
One click away from calculation
Takes away their education.

When did this digital preference start?
Oh, why no poetry learnt by heart?
‘Spell check’ becomes their favourite teacher
With ‘grammar check’ an added feature.
The only future expectation,
A self-taught on-line education.

The infants are learning to use a pen
It’s not a skill they’ll need again,
For a future spent staring on-line,
Social activity in decline
With hardly any interaction,
So they won’t need our education.

PMW 2015

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Navigation - Sat-nav or Map?

“Navigation? Simple. There’s an app for that.”

I have my own ‘app’ in the form of an enlarged, easy to read road atlas. It is far better than the rude interruptions from the voice of the sat-nav in the middle of a conversation and making me lose my drift. It’s more reliable than the sat-nav, as well.

We used a sat-nav, or whatever it is on my husband’s phone when we were touring in our caravan last summer. Travelling from The Machars in Dumfries & Galloway to Maybole in Ayrshire, I wasn’t looking forward to the A77 and A78 which are always busy at any time of day. I wasn’t driving, but it’s still worrying as a passenger, ahem, back seat driver. I was saved the anxiety by the route the sat-nav chose to take. Miles and miles of single-track, harem scarem road, cutting through the lesser known depths of Galloway Forest Park, eventually releasing us into the freedom of rural Ayrshire. Not the best road for towing a caravan and we felt relieved to be unscathed, and alone. In all those miles we hadn’t encountered another vehicle. Drivers were either wise to avoid that way, or they knew we were out. It was a bad experience which made us wary of the sat-nav and we kept to the A roads after that.

On a visit to the Outer Hebrides – no caravan, just car and cottages – we travelled north from touring the Uists to base ourselves in the Isle of Harris to explore Harris and Lewis. We were in a hilly area. The highest mountain in the Outer Hebrides was near, The Clisham at 799 metres, standing majestically over our cottage. Out one day for a drive and a look around, I was navigating using an OS map. We were aiming for the west coast. I was struggling with reading the tiny details on the map and soon thought we’d – I’d – gone wrong somewhere and couldn’t find any landmarks matching the map. We were on the cliff-edge road of a mountain and I was so scared that I couldn’t speak. I was literally stunned into silence. There was relief eventually when we found ourselves descending towards a small beach, a couple of cars and a handful of people. With map in hand, I explained that we’d become lost and sought their help. This lovely family came to our aid, turned the map the right way up, and pointed to where we were. They set us back on the right track, which involved a return journey back up the mountain road, but at least we were on the inside lane this time. I hope they didn’t ridicule us too much when they went home to Scandinavia. Oops. Don’t trust me with a hard to read OS map in the Hebrides, or anywhere in the world.

When I was in junior school, probably aged nine or ten, we were tasked with doing a project on something of our own choice. Girls favoured pop music or fashion. Boys chose cars or the armed forces. There were other things picked, but looking back, how gender categorised we all must have been. Of all the things in the world, I picked compasses. This was because there was a picture of a mariner’s compass on the front of a world atlas at home, and it fascinated me. The project didn’t get beyond two items, the mariner’s compass and a Girl Guides one. Good drawings, though, even if I say so myself. We’ve come a long way since navigating by a compass was all we had, especially at sea. The digital era has taken us over in the name of progress.

I’ll stick with the easy to read road atlas, even if it does weigh a ton on my knee in the car. I’m about to navigate us to Scotland then to Warwickshire, so I’ll be missing, but hopefully not lost. Back soon.

 Navigation

Lost in South Harris
When the map was upside down
And we got mixed up.

Study the road map
Give confident directions
And have a Plan B.

Work out the distance,
Choose where to make cmfort stops
To break the journey.


Rude interruption,
Strict, assertive instructions.
Who needs a sat-nav?

PMW 2024

 Thanks for reading, Pam x

 

 

 

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Days That Changed the World - WWW

30^th April 1993, a very significant date that I was unaware of until I looked it up. CERN, which is the French acronym for the European Council for Nuclear Research, put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. Since then, we’ve all been just a click away from more or less everything.  A day that changed the world.

As the level of technology progressed, the equipment for its use gradually became smaller in size. Computers nearly 60 centimetres deep and needing a massive processor, both filling a purpose built desk and taking up lots of office space – or half a room in our house – has reduced to the average smart phone. We have the whole world in our hands.

I love books and our house is full of them, but I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for a shelf full of pristine volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica when I’m ‘Googling’ things. The information I want is right there, with links to connected interests. I can’t imagine being without the internet, or my mobile phone, not now.

I wasn’t going to bother having a mobile phone. I didn’t need one for myself. My husband got one and we’d share it while we were away. We could let family know we had arrived safely after an epic drive to Pembrokeshire and we were settling in nicely. That phone turned out to be a God-send, keeping us in touch with family when my mother-in-law, also away on holiday, had taken ill and was in hospital. It was just a phone, what else would you want? Soon, the sky was the limit.

I did get my own phone, a basic phone, oh, I think text messaging was possible, too. I wouldn’t leave home without it. The next best thing was a camera on the phone. Digital, of course. Easy to download snaps of a day out on to the PC or laptop – yes, I’d got one of those by now. It wasn’t long before I’d agreed to a mobile contract with an all singing, all dancing phone, with camera, internet data, bells and whistles. Me, who didn’t want all this ‘crazy stuff’, to start with, now had up to date modern technology in my handbag, at my fingertips.

I missed it when it wasn’t there, though it was good to ‘click off’ for a while. There was no internet and no phone signal where we regularly stay in Scotland – until recently. We would stop the car at the top of the lane, last chance for a signal, before going down to the lodge. There would be no more contact until an early morning dog walk back up the hill to check for messages. It was good to relax, no interruption. It is different now. WiFi arrived. The lodges have upgraded to smart televisions and internet routers. We’ve all moved with the times.

I send emails to the USA with immediate arrival when previously a snail-mail letter would take days.

It is all good until there’s the dreaded system failure. When this happened at work, those of us who remembered how we did it before technology sharpened our pencils and our wits and got on with it. Not easy in a fully computerised dental practice. Fortunately the occurrence was rare and promptly rectified.

World Wide Web changed the world, brought it closer, and changed the way we do things. It is the way we are.

I found this poem by Dr Wayne Visser,

Change the World

Let’s change the world, let’s shift it
Let’s shake and remake it
Let’s rearrange the pieces
The patterns in the maze
The reason for our days
In ways that make it better
In shades that make it brighter
That make the burden lighter
Because it’s shared, because we dared
To dream and then to sweat it
To make our mark and not regret it
Let’s plant a seed and humbly say:
I changed the world today!

Let’s change the world, let’s lift it
Let’s take it and awake it
Let’s challenge every leader
The citadels of power
The prisoners in the tower
The hour of need’s upon us
It’s time to raise our voices
To stand up for our choices
Because it’s right, because we fight
For all that’s just and fair
For a planet we can share
Let’s join the cause and boldly say:
We’ll change the world today!

Let’s change the world, let’s love it
Let’s hold it and unfold it
Let’s redesign the future
The fate of earth and sky
The existential why
Let’s fly to where there’s hope
To where the world is greener
Where air and water’s cleaner
Because it’s smart to make a start
To fix what we have broken
Our children’s wish unspoken
Let’s be the ones who rise and say:
We changed the world today!

Wayne Visser © 2018

 Thanks for reading, Pam x

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