Frazz by Jef Mallett for May 03, 2016

According to the students, that school is filled with enough boredom to fill a dozen Bulwer-Lytton novels. Surely these kids can feel something else?

The irony. I was in elementary school during the 60s. Grades 1-6. We had a “dark room” near the cafeteria, and the teacher had to reserve it. It was a special event when she got us to line up for the dark room. We would sit there while she turned on the filmstrip projector. It was like being in a theater to us. Each slide had a caption, and we all wanted to be the one picked to read it. Audio visual was so rare that it was a treat.

By junior high, there were mobile carts with movie projectors. It might be a film on the building of the Glen Canyon Dam or the life cycle of a moth, but it was a movie.

By the time I started teaching, we had VCRs and big screen tube TVs, but the kids were already bored because they had that at home.

I understand how kids can be bored by a slide show now, when they can watch something exciting on the phone in their pockets. Things have changed, and I accept that.

But when I was a kid, the words “boring” and “slide show” never happened in the same sentence.

In the 40’s and 50’s, any break in the regular routine was celebrated. Could have been a movie about mold, but it made a change.Nowadays, maybe they can get students’ attention if they send the visual to students’ phones.Oh, yeah, forgot – that would be interfering with students’ right to do any thing other than learn something new.

Consider it training for enduring PowerPoint in the future.

MaxStarmanJonesAnd the credits for an ERPI movie would always get a giggle.