- Messages
- 12,969
- Location
- Germany
I'm 35. Is creamy greek yoghurt with 10% fat still allowed??
I’d wager that many a man could, if he dropped his defenses enough to allow for a detached view of the matter, find in Ignatius a little bit of his own adolescent self.
Alas, adolescence extends well beyond the teen years for most of us, eh?
When you realize you've been on eBay for 23 years.
Technology and I have a love/hate relationship, I love to hate it. About a year or so ago, there was a tentative knock on the door. It was our next door neighbour, would I help their son with his mathematics homework? Previously I had helped him through his understanding, or should that be, misunderstanding, of quadratic equations, the algebraic form had caused many tears. This time he was having severe difficulty getting his head around the binary system.I never touched a computer until I was thirty-three. Unless you count pocket calculators or the TRS-80 they tried to get me to use instead of a typewriter at one of my radio jobs, and I hated it so much I "accidentally" spilled a glass of Alka-Seltzer into the keyboard...
When the American Fender Stratocaster you saved for two years to buy as a student is now twenty-six years old, considered "vintage", and finally worth more than you paid for it in 1994....
When you look at your friends round the pub table, and the ones who once made you feel old are saying how others at the table make *them* feel old. Andthose others, you realise, are youjng enough to have been your children - and respectably so.
Not for nothing does my vocabulary contain the phrase "teenage boys of all ages"...
For me, eBay for eighteen years, and TFL for thirteen. This year, I'm teaching final year undergraduates born in 1999 - the year I started work, and the year after I graduated for the second time. Next year, I'll be teaching kids younger than my "career", and technically young enough to be the children of those I taught in my first year.
I first used the web when I was twenty-two. This year I'm teaching four dozen, final-year unergraduates who don't remember dial-up internet, andfor whom Thatcher an Regan are as historical as Henry VIII.
...and they certainly don't remember rotary dial phones!
"What's the point of it though," he suddenly said. "Point of what?" I replied. "Binary, of course," he answered. I explained that when the telegraph service came about, a system was needed to send messages, that's when Samuel Morse came up with his Morse Code. His dots and dashes replaced zero and one. I then asked if he had seen punch tape coming out of a machine in old movies, he had. Explaining that the holes and no holes replaced zero and one. But when I said that when pulse, no pulse replaced zero and one, you had the basis of a computer system, his eyes lit up, his whole demeanour changed, suddenly, in his parlance, binary was "Cool."
You kidding? Some of them don't get why you'd bother with a landline at all - "why phone a building to see if someone is in it when you could just phone their phone?"
And there, Edward, is where you have hit the hammer right on the head. In my schooldays I was lucky enough to have the kind of English teacher with that gift of relevance. He would give you sections of homework of whatever your weakest subject was, to be written out half a dozen times, as a form of punishment for any sort of transgression. He did this as an alternative to writing out, "I must not talk in class," 500 times. A number of us actually argued that learning Shakespeare was irrelevant in modern society. A month later, our English class was to attend the Shakespearean play: "Othello." We were allowed to bring our text books into the theatre, but most of us were unexpectedly absorbed by the play. Better still, when the audience had left, we were brought down to the front two rows to meet the cast who had returned to the stage, still in costume, to answer our questions. The cast all sat on the edge of the stage and addressed every question, or confrontation, asked of them. I had the same lifting of the scales as my young neighbour did, I saw how Shakespeare had changed our language, how he had dropped things like verb endings, how we didn't need to conjugate verbs like those who speak of a Latin based language, and so much more. At last I grasped Shakespeare's blank verse, to this day I have such a liking for the work of The Bard and that's all thanks to Mr McCardle, my former English teacher.This is the secret to good teaching that so many fall down on: you have to find the relevancy.
We still have, and use, our rotary phone, the one that was installed in our first home in 1968. But we also have a modern phone connected to it. There's two reasons why the modern phone is there. Firstly, it shows on it's screen, the incoming number, which we can then decide whether we want to take the call or not. Secondly, rotary phones cannot be used when you have a choice menu. If you are asked to press one for money, two for the show, dialling it will get you cut off.The kids here all know how to use a rotary phone, because they've all used one at my house.
Rotary phones were still dominant in Maine until the mid-1990s, which was a time less than twenty years removed from the elimination of the state's last manual exchange. I never used a touch-tone phone until I was in my late twenties, and I've never actually had one installed in my house.
You kidding? Some of them don't get why you'd bother with a landline at all - "why phone a building to see if someone is in it when you could just phone their phone?"
...
We still have, and use, our rotary phone, the one that was installed in our first home in 1968. But we also have a modern phone connected to it. There's two reasons why the modern phone is there. Firstly, it shows on it's screen, the incoming number, which we can then decide whether we want to take the call or not. Secondly, rotary phones cannot be used when you have a choice menu. If you are asked to press one for money, two for the show, dialling it will get you cut off.