Today at work was good overall. We have constant issues with ICT over in our little hut, and teaching it is always a little daunting. However, opening one file from the shared server on each of 22 laptops really shouldn’t have been the utter chore it turned out to be. The task I had given then was a fairly simple one – create a newspaper report highlighting the awe and wonder the first moon landing in 1969 created for people. A few video clips from the BBC and other news providers showed how people around the world reacted to the events. I was also able to show them the horribly grainy footage of the event itself while explaining the reason for the poor quality – it’s very hard for children living in a 3D HD TV world to imagine a tiny, black and white 650 line image being the only source available for such an event. Seeing it in that way actually doesn’t create any kind of awe and wonder – it’s not impressive. If anything, it detracts from the brilliance for a modern audience I feel.
They are a brilliant group to work with in this topic – they are all fully engaged and interested in it. Most of them wonder why we don’t visit the Moon now and explaining that actually, we don’t need to at this moment, is really difficult. Particularly when, personally, I would love to see people on there in my life time. I can’t imagine the thrill of something happening that has never happened before, something so momentous that will be looked back on for centuries to come.
I digress, the point is that, unlike Armstrong who apparently stayed utterly calm when landing on the Moon (see the links below), my afternoon was fairly stressful.
Tonight has been full of reports and The Apprentice. Getting more into it than last night, but I always find the first few episodes hard to watch as 16 people is just too many to follow easily.
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