I present: your child's homework!

[ShockQueen]

Another OT threadjack - class of '85 here.........

I remember when we did a mock-up of the human body - nervous, respiratory, circulatory, and digestive systems.......all done up using a huge sheet of butcher paper with a human outline, and then we drew the nerves and blood vessels on the paper, and cutting out construction paper and colouring it for the different organs. Quite a fun project really.

We weren't allowed to use calculators in elementary school, unlike the ones now that parents have to literally buy a pocket computer for. I mean....why study when you can have a machine do it for you?

We were taught to THINK because we didn't have machines to do it for us all the time. I did take some computer languages in high school though - LOGO, Pascal, and Basic........on an Apple II with disc drives. We got games by buying computer magazines and inputting the programs we found in the back - seemed much more satisfying then, since you had to really work for it.

I have an article here that I received describing the times between now and back in the 80's too..........one of many I'm sure.

SQ
-going back to dreaming of simpler times

[air914]

this is why I always felt projects were so stupid - and I don't have kids yet, but I dred the day they bring home the awful "Project". It's not the kids that do it - if you want the kids to do a project, do it in class. It ends up the parents do the entire project and their kid gets an A - or the parent doesn't care, waits until the last second, and their kid tries to scramble to create something and ends up with an F.

I understand that maybe there was a time that projects "brought families together" or some nonsense.... so that parents were "in" on the learning experience - but I remember screaming fights and tears with my parents over doing projects..... and I can't say I remember learning a whole heck of a lot. Even my science projects - I just read what the book said and wrote up the project - but didn't necessarily understand what I was doing - still got an A - really proves the system works, huh?

[Ironclad Alibi]

I've heard there are places that need professional researchers - not in the sense of experimenting and figuring things out, but in the sense of finding out what's already known about stuff.

Maybe you could research professional researching?

One such job is a patent searcher. A patent searcher researches old patents to determine if an invention has been done before, and to determine what's new about the invention. The results help to guide the inventor and patent attorney/agent in the writing of patent applications. It's part of what I do.