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What items pupils take to school has greatly changed over the years

Schools
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Back when I was a primary school pupil the one thing, besides our text books, that we had to ensure we brought to school, was our own pen with a supply of nibs. This was back when school desks had an inkwell built into them, and classrooms were forever filled with the sound of pens scraping across the page. The very idea of having to re-ink your pen every few words must seem archaic now, and it wouldn`t surprise me if pens and paper soon became old fashioned artefacts, of no use in this age of emails and touch screens. The items a school pupil has to take with them to their classes every day has certainly changed greatly over the last few decades.

Back in the 1960`s when I was a pupil at school, slide rules were the main tools used for calculations. There were other kinds of desktop counting device - I seem to remember a classmate of mine had a strange gadget shaped like a keyboard, containing a number of dials, which he would turn with a metal pen to make calculations. The teacher had a huge hulking device, like a cash register, which could be used to multiply huge numbers, but I think it was only employed to add up our marks in tests. For most pupils the slide rule was a daily companion. Small enough to fit in your pencil case, the slide rule was so named because the middle section could move freely back and forth, its marked graduations permitting addition, subtraction, multiplication and devision.

The 1970`s saw the introduction of battery operated handheld calculators. Students today would be surprised to learn just how technologically advanced these calculators appeared at the time. The earliest versions had glowing red displays, the numbers and symbols showing with bright LED (light emitting diode) lights. By the late 1970`s these portable calculators had become affordable, and the majority of schoolchildren would have owned one of them. Compared to the slide rule an electronic calculator was capable of making instantaneous calculations, and was simply a far more versatile device - until your batteries ran out that is!

Small dictionaries were an item we were required to bring to school every day. The tiny books had tissue thin paper, and the typeface was so minute even our young eyes had trouble reading it. During English lessons we often had to take turns reading passages from a novel we were studying. Whenever we stumbled over the pronunciation of a difficult word our teacher would correct us, then enquire as to its definition. Since words that were hard to pronounce were often of abstruse meaning, the narrator most often failed to answer. After much eye rolling by our demanding teacher, the question would be put to the rest of the class, and when the correct meaning was not forthcoming we would all be asked to `look the word up in your dictionary.` The teacher would then ask one of us to read out the definition, and we might be asked to construct a sentence using the word.

I suspect dictionary and thesaurus sales have fallen drastically over the last twenty years. Both Cambridge and Collins have their entire lexicons posted online - it is certainly less time consuming to do an online search for a word definition than leafing through a huge book.

Fountain pens are another piece of schooling paraphernalia that have all but vanished from the classroom. I can recall the novelty of owning a pen that held its own ink supply, where you didn`t have to dip your nib in the inkwell of your desk every few moments. It seems that with ever more schoolwork being submitted online, penmanship is becoming a thing of the past. Of course paper and the written word still exist in schools, but perhaps teachers and students find the maintenance fountain pens require, and the possibility of them leaking, to be an encumbrance.

Who knows what items pupils will have to bring with them to school twenty or thirty years from now? Perhaps the very concept of a school being a building pupils attend will become redundant. Remote learning may become the norm, with pupils attending classes from the comfort of their own homes. It seems the internet will play a more prominent role in future classes - as a learning resource it surely contains more information than any library ever built; unfortunately it also provides the greatest temptation and opportunity to be distracted and waste time!

3 years ago
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