And don't forget the beep after each slide
By adamg - Fri, 04/25/2008 - 7:50am.
Mr. Cooper reports on a law-school class where not a single student knew what the professor was talking about when he mentioned "elementary-school filmstrips:"
... Am I the only one who feels a pang of regret about this? I mean, by now everything's on DVD, but I never really thought about the fact that future generations are going to be spared the joys of that crappy little film moving frame by frame along with the often unintelligible narration of a cassette tape. What an extraordinary shame.
| 
| 
That's not the half of it...
I still occasionally get nostalgic for the smell of mimeographed handouts, but so far none of the 20-somethings in my office has been able to muster a clue as to what I'm talking about when I mention it out loud ;-)
mimeograph == ditto ?
Are these the same things as "ditto machines", which produced (sometimes blurry) blue-on-white printing with an unforgettable sweet smell?
As I got older I recall these being replaced with "stencil machines" that produced (clearer) black-and-white with no discernable odor.
Ditto machines!
Yeah, the things with the icky carbon-paperish thing that you carefully placed atop the drum in what looked like a giant metallic mutant turtle - and then the teacher would hand out the copies out in class and everybody would sniff the paper to try to get buzzed or something.
Not that everything about the good ol' days was good: I'm glad my daughter doesn't have to worry about breathing in chalk dust - as fun as it was to get everybody coughing by slapping two erasers together.
mmmmm
That smell was delicious. Loved the ditto machine! Also, I totally remember the films where you had to play a cassette along with the filmstrip. And I'm 26 years old! These 20-somethings you're referring to must have gone to private school or something.
I'm 23 and I remember them
I'm 23 and I remember them too...
Cassette tape?
Cassette tape?
re: Cassette tape?
I miss cassette tapes. Especially mix tapes.
While I share the nostalgia
... I have to admit that just having to pop in a DVD with all the advantages it offers is probably much better for kids these days in their schools. I grew up at the end of the film strip era where it was an honor to be the kid who got to flip the slides. Still it was a waste of time to have the film melt or have the narration be inaudible (I can still do a good imitation of that underwater sound). I also went to school at the beginning of the VHS era which had it's own problems (mainly in the teachers inability to use it). Yeah, kids these days have it better.
Carousel slide projectors and overhead projectors
are other technologies I remember from school (and sometimes college), that I suspect aren't much used anymore.
Powerpoint?
Do you think school kids have to endure Powerpoint slide shows like we adults do? I hope not for their sake.
Turning out the next generation of middle management
Part of the fourth-grade computer curriculum at the kidlet's school is PowerPoint. Yes, I, too, weep for future generations.
some more obsolescent educational technologies
Movie projectors (8mm and 16mm)
Record players
Opaque projectors
"Educational radio" receivers for special classroom instruction programs that weren't on regular radio stations. I don't know how they really worked, but I suspect they received subcarrier FM signals.
Blackboards and chalk -- to what extent have whiteboards and markers displaced these?
Language labs!
An entire room filled with desks with UN-translator type headphones with giant connector plugs so that we could all listen to Spanish on an LP or tape deck while the teacher was supposed to be able to listen in on our parroting and correct us. Thank you, godless Communist Russians for forcing our school district to install these things after Sputnik and then continue to use them long after their expiration date.
Desks with inkwells (no, I'm not that old, but the desks at PS 222 in Brooklyn were).
Tach-X machines.
Mercury thermometers in junior-high science class.
The black-and-white TV with the rabbit ears on the big rolling cart the teacher would roll in every couple of weeks so we could watch some show on the local "educational television" station about how corn grows or somesuch.
Three Stooges movies and Looney Tunes cartoons in the auditorium on rainy/snowy days. Captain Hemo "cartoons."
Waiting-to-be-incinerated nuclear-attack drills.
Tach-X?
What's that? Google and Wikipedia are not helpful.
Tachistoscope
It was some gizmo designed to test your short-term memory or peripheral vision or something. Basically, it would flash something on a screen faster and faster until it had weeded out all the kids who needed immediate assignment to the vocational track or something. For whatever reasons, the state of New York used to put great stock in these things.
Which brings us to:
Typing class. With actual typewriters. Which I took for THREE years, which is what happens when your parents are going through a messy divorce and you move around a lot and the schools don't know what to do with you and so put you in the voke track (in addition to all that typing, I also took TWO semesters of wood shop, one semester of metal shop and one semester of print shop, which prepared me for a lucrative career in the exciting world of stationery printing, or would have, if, like everybody else, I weren't too busy constantly jamming lead type into a tiny holder thing until the pressure made it basically explode, showering the area around you with dozens of little tiny letters made of lead).
Use For Tachistoscope
Some professional blackjack players (card counters, for instance) have used a tachistoscope to train themselves to see more quickly or readily. Other advantage players use them (in training) so that they can more readily catch glimpses of dealer's hole cards. Never tried it myself, so I can't speak to the effectiveness.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
So tach-y
Now that I think of it, maybe they were using the gizmo to try to make us think faster - and only then did they separate us into different tracks (so like spinning the wheel in "Life"). That would certainly explain why I seem to remember it as a regular thing. Don't know that it helped in my case. :-).
Typing class
That was the only useful class I took in all two years of High School. I had to argue to get into it, as it was on the vocational track and I was on the college track. They said "You're going to go to college; you don't need to know how to type." (I had the unorthodox idea that meant I had more of a need for typing).
I rapidly became a very fast typist, thanks to Ms. Schultz repeating G G G G F F F F while strolling behind us with a yardstick ready to swat the errant. Today I'm one of the few at my workplace who can type without looking at the keyboard. And, yes, I still space twice after periods and colons.
My mother demanded that I take typing class
and it was the smartest decision she ever made for me against my will. I should call her up tonight and thank her once again for it.
I'm law school age
23, that is, and I definitely remember film strips. National Geographic cassettes, with the beep after each slide. Where was the rest of my cohort?