I’ve been teaching every day this week (a bit of a shock to the system I can tell you!) and yesterday I was doing a reading lesson with a group of about fifteen Year 5s (9 – 10 yr olds). We were reading a book call Thief! by Malorie Blackman (first published in 1995). In the book a young girl, who is wrongly accused at school of being a thief, finds herself in the future where things have not gone well for her family. After some nail-biting happenings, in which she gathers some important information about the real thief, she manages to get back to her own time and tries to right the wrong and expose the true thief.
We were coming to the end of the book (which the children had been reading for several weeks), when the girl is back in her own time, and there was a paragraph where one of the characters presses the ‘Play’ button on the VCR. “What’s a VCR?” I asked the group. A sea of blank faces met my expectant gaze. I re-read the sentence where the ‘Play’ button is pressed, emphasising the word play, and one of the boys in the group decided he might venture a suggestion. “Is it a thing where you can put this thing like a black rectangle into it and you can watch a film or something?”. As he spoke he was describing with his hands the size of this ‘black rectangle thing’, but couldn’t remember what you actually called it. When I said “Do you mean a video?” “Yes” he said “That’s it”. I think one other child looked as though this was something he might have heard of, but the rest of the group just continued to look blank.
I went on to describe what a VCR was, and a video tape – I explained how we used to use them, how we had to set the timer for the start time and end time of a TV programme, and how we would rewind the tape to the start when we had watched it and record something else on top. They listened intently, fascinated, with looks of wonder on their faces. I felt as though I was describing something like the very first sewing machine, or record player – something that even I would consider ‘olden days’ technology. Of course these children are all used to the digital age – digital cameras, all singing all dancing phones, flat screen TVs with the ability to pause live TV or record a series of programmes with the touch of a button.
It’s amazing just how quickly technology has moved on, and that something that seems to me as though it was ‘new technology’ relatively recently is suddenly very old hat!
My dad still has a VCR, so my brother (age 6) hopefully knows what one is. I’d imagine most kids in his class have never seen one though.
He’d be the one in my group then, who know what this ‘old fashioned’ piece of kit is!
We have a combi VCR/DVD because a few of the kids favourite videos didn’t make it to DVD and they all still work!
I’m certain that quite a few of my kids classmates would have no clue about what a video is though.
I did have to use Google images to show our kids what a typewriter was last year though, and they thought it was hilarious!
Life moves faster than we like to think!
I think if I still had a young family, we’d still be using our VCR – for all the favourite videos. We finally cleared ours out a year or two ago.
Explaining to evening business classes of young adults the different kinds of typewriters I used as a secretary before PCs and laptops makes me feel like a dinosaur! And explaining what a telex machine was and how you used it is even more challenging.
Ah, the good old days of the typewriter – and do you remember using carbon paper to make copies of your work?
Oh yes, and I don’t miss it – I always managed to get my fingers dirty.
I’d forgotten about that aspect of things!
I wonder what your children would think to my dad’s cine camera and 8mm projector. Or sitting in front of the stereo with a microphone and a reel to reel tapedeck trying to tape the top 40
They probably would think it was something from the dark ages! I remember happy days (Sunday afternoons I think) trying to record the top 40!
Ah the fun of recording with a hand held microphone.
Do you remember when you listened to the songs you had recorded, you could hear people in the background and the occasional shhh, when they got too loud.
I wonder how many of today’s children could sit quietly on the floor recording the top 40.
Ah, the good old days!
Children today probably wouldn’t have the patience.
Strangely, VCRs are still alive and well in America. Our local library had a much bigger video collection than dvd.
That’s very interesting – it’s the opposite of what I would have imagined!
We never bought a VCR, it seemed too hard to make it work. I glad we never did because now we have a CD player that plays music or movies
judy
We were so excited to have the new technology of a VCR that we would have put up with any challenges to make it work!
Gosh, reading that makes me feel very old!