Learning past and present

 One difference between the kind of education I had and that of many children today centres around how we were taught.

For most of my education for instance generally the teacher led the class learning determining what the days topic was in any given subject. They often would dictate notes or write them down on a chalk board for you to copy to your exercise book sometimes with drawings or diagrams too which was fun if you were not good at writing or spelling things as you'd struggle to keep up.

Sometimes we'd have school made duplicated work sheets for some subjects such as Combined Science to complete as we did experiments with Bunsen burners, electricity and magnets.

In History we often read from and makes notes using set text books and all homework (and there was heaps of it!) was to be completed by hand.

This scene would be almost familiar to me in high school as we'd move from old style individual wooden desks to clusters of tables and plastic chairs except for one thing.

That's right, where the girl is sat we'd have our exercise book but she has a laptop which looking at this picture closely is something most of her peers do not suggesting she has 'special needs' and has been given one for 'writing up things' with.

That is something I'd of benefited from personally as my hand writing was poor and spelling pretty rotten too.

At their school they have put the first years (11+) in a special converted unit to work on thinking, studying and life skills to help bridge the gap from the last years of junior school they have left to a secondary school.

A number of schools today have huge screens,  some interactive, for teaching with rather than chalkboards (they were called Blackboards until some edict came down saying that word was racist!) but debate rages as to whither or not this is any more effective from the chalkboard and rote learning we had.