Back in my school days in the 1960s, I always looked forward to an hour or two during class when we’d get to watch a film.
For once, students wouldn’t have to bury their faces in a textbook.
It was a glorious sight when someone would wheel in a film projector. It was almost as good as when dad would let us watch home movies of a trips to Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm or scenes of my sister Jody and I walking into the living room on Christmas morning and seeing our presents under the tree.
Maybe the teacher would show us a sex education film about the merging of a sperm and an egg and the growth of a fetus inside the womb.
Or something historical like an overview of the Civil War. First, though, he or she would have to thread the film through the projector and that wasn’t always easy. Thankfully, the projector would normally have a diagram show the correct way to thread the film.
Sometimes, if we were really lucky, we’d get to watch a classic Hollywood movie. I can remember in junior high watching ‘Captain Courageous,’ a 1937 film starring Freddy Bartholomew. Spencer Tracy and Lionel Barrymore. In a nutshell, the plot can be summed up as: A spoiled brat who falls overboard from a steamship in the 1920s gets picked up by a New England fishing boat, where he’s made to earn his keep by joining the crew in their work.
The only headache might be if the film should break. That would ruin all the fun.
Kids in school nowadays probably think what I’m describing is the dark ages. Heck, even VHS tapes, VCR, movie DVDs and DVD players belong to the trash bin of history.
I haven’t seen modern technology in action in today’s classroom, but I can make an educated guess. Maybe in HDTV, Internet access and some kind of streaming service offering educational programming?
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I’m Mike Staton and I’m an author with six published novels. Three are sword and sorcery novels, and the last three have American Civil War settings. The latest, which debuted on May 1, takes place during Reconstruction in North Carolina, and stars a newspaper editor, and his wife, a graphic artist. It’s part of a four-book series that will see my main characters head westward into the American frontier in the final novel, now being written. I’m currently writing that fourth book, which I’ve titled ‘A Wyoming Dawn: A New Beginning.’