Nostalgia

Two blog posts I read today reminded me of school events in my past. The first was a January 1 post by the Savvy Technologist, Tim Wilson. In this post, Tim demonstrates how the Google search box can be used to do a calculation.

I tried to convert gills to pecks... it didn't do it automatically, but it did point me to some pages where I was reminded of my classroom days in the late 1950s when I learned these conversions by rote... two pints, one quart, four quarts, one gallon and, of course, 4 pecks in a bushel. Reminds me of a post I read earlier this week about the value (?) of memorization.

The second post that brought back memories concerned stop animation and had a google video link to a movie by Norman McLaren, produced for the National Filmboard of Canada in 1952. I recall seeing this movie in school and and again in university when I was studying media. I also showed it to my students in my early years of teaching and used it as a resource for teaching simple animation. I recall this as a valuable resource and judging by the content of this blog entry, it is still an useful teaching tool.