I may have done teacher training for Further Education and taught for the whole of my career in Britain in Secondary Education, but there is a part of me that thinks that I would have been more satisfied in Primary.
I don’t mean the Primary Education of today with restrictions on what an individual teacher can teach and with assessment testing at every whipstitch, but rather in the more ample days when teachers had the latitude to gain objectives by using their individual initiative in the classroom and creating learning opportunities with paper, scissors, glue, and other materials.
There is something magical in standing up in front of a class with a sheet of plain A4 paper and saying, “I want you to start folding your sheet of paper like this.” The hands-on experience of something as mundane as folding a piece of paper and, sometimes tearing bits off, always engaged pupils – and gave them a sense of satisfaction if they actually managed to follow the instructions!
My greatest achievement in paper folding and sticking in Secondary School was, in one double period, getting the class to write a short script with a couple of scene changes and then create a miniature stage, complete with proscenium arch with flying scenery and paper puppets to act out the script.
At the end of the double-period I was a frenetic, gibbering wreck and the kids were hysterical, but we got it all done and there was a real sense of achievement. What the kids were like going on to their next lessons I didn’t have the energy with which to speculate, but I wouldn’t have liked to be teaching them!
These exhausting memories came back when I was trying to complete a fairly simple task, where the thinking bits had already been done and all that was required was for the ideas to be worked out with the programs and the materials that I had to hand.
And one of those tools was Word. In all its glory.
As someone who learned to type on a ‘real’ typewriter (and has a certificate to prove it!) the ease with which Word does what it took me hours to painstakingly work out makes many of the skills that I learned completely redundant.
The example of the centred menu comes to mind. Today, with a program like Word, all you have to do is type out the items in the menu, highlight, and click centre, and it’s done. It was not like that in the Old Days. Just take the title: M E N U
The word ‘menu’ has four letters, in the example above I have added a space between the letters making a total of seven key strikes. Knowing the total number of keystrokes in an A4 sheet of paper, you subtracted your 7 key strikes from the total and then divided the remainder by two to get the number of spaces that you would have to leave to get the word MENU exactly centred on the page. The space bar of the typewriter could be depressed and held down which moved the carriage of the machine forward a half-space, so that the spaces could accommodate and half-space when the sums were done!
I am delighted that such labour is now behind us, and Word offers so much more. Not, of course that the normal user of the program understands or even guesses at just how much power there is in the program.
As I keep saying, I use my highly sophisticated computer as a glorified typewriter and am constantly grateful that I do not have to use Tippex (in liquid or sheet form) to correct my mistakes. Indeed, the program usefully corrects things it decides are typos as you go along and then there is the click on ‘Editor’ which lists errors it has found and offers you the chance to do something about them.
Typewriter keys could not be changed, you were stuck with the typeface that the keys had. No choice. Now, only your imagination and the depth of your pocket limit the typefaces that you have at your fingertips.
But, for me, the problems start when I start to use the power of the program and go beyond the glorified typewriter status that my machine usually has.
The challenge that I had was to have things going in different directions rather than sticking to the usual top to bottom, left to right order of things. And I was trying something new.
Now, after years of Toni saying the same thing when I start moaning about how to do something, “Go on YouTube and ask!” I have finally found that what he has been saying has some merit and somewhere on YouTube, as long as you ask the right questions, you will find that some saddo or other has gone to the trouble of making a semi-coherent film giving you some pointers towards an answer to your problem.
My problems are usually, not that I am using Word, after all, who doesn’t?
My problems come when I realise that I have been looking at an explanation that doesn’t cover the fact that I am not using a Windows machine, I am using a Mac, and there are and always have been subtle differences, but differences big enough to cause almost complete nervous collapse as you try and work out why the simple instructions do not work for you.
Eventually, I find a way – or rather I find the set of instructions that go with my Mac and with the version of Word that I am using. But time has passed, and I know that the next time that I try and do something similar, I will have forgotten a simple but essential step that gives success.
But that is part of the price you pay for not having to count up spaces to centre a heading. And, on balance it’s a price worth paying.
