The best course is not always to wipe the old slate clean
As someone who has always basically considered the word “change” synonymous with “wreck”, “destroy” and “create chaos for inexplicable reasons” – with an accompanying undercurrent of “and incur needless expense doing so!” – nothing gladdens my heart like research that shows up modernity’s mindless pursuit of it for the futile thing it is.
When it comes during a week in which the all-devouring US supermarket chain Walmart patented a technology that will allow it to eavesdrop on its cashiers, and China announced that it is just a couple of years away from enabling an algorithm to assign a “social score” to every citizen, all set against a backdrop of Facebook-filtered news, targeted ads and all the dystopian rest of it – well, that’s just gravy.
The latest batch of lubricating sauce to ease the digestion of the dish of modern life comes from the Education Endowment Foundation, a charity that specialises in improving classroom standards. It recently completed a three-year investigation with 140 schools into the effects of ditching ipads, interactive whiteboards and other contemporary learning tools, and reintroducing chalk slates. It found that they produced an effect equivalent to an extra two months of learning time for pupils.
Being able to scribble down answers and hold them up to the teacher en masse apparently democratised the process, and enabled the teachers to spread their attention more evenly, instead of limiting themselves to the students confident enough to put their hands up. Less academically-able children benefited even more from this real-time, real-interaction twist on things than their more proficient peers.
I would hazard a guess that the relatively slow, deliberate process of forming letters and numbers with a piece of chalk on an abrasive surface – so that you have time to attach a meaning to every curve, line and resulting word – may also have played its part.
It’s not Luddism to query any sudden and wholesale adoption of an essentially untried technology (and the internet and all its associated accoutrements is fundamentally an uncontrolled experiment on the guileless minds of a global population), especially when it is imposed on children.
Experiments like the Foundation’s are a vital brake on runaway, unfiltered enthusiasm and a corrective to the common mindset, which says that change is, in and of itself, good. Often – no matter how much my natural urge screams otherwise – it is. But not always. Sometimes people in the past really did know stuff. Sometimes it’s OK to build on that rather than raze it all to the ground and start anew. Sometimes it’s best to keep things exactly as they are and resist the urge to wipe the dull, efficient, effective, slate clean.
It is the best of times – we are going on holiday. It is the worst of times – I am packing. The first bit’s easy; pad the roller suitcases’ heavily-ridged interiors with underwear, while pondering the phenomenon that makes little boy underpants so cute and the exact same thing in man-size so monstrous.
The second bit, our sartorial requirements, is OK too, as long as my husband doesn’t get involved and start having opinions about how many clothes he needs. Or rather, doesn’t need. He reckons a single pair of trousers and seven shirts will suffice for a fortnight.
I cannot shake this conviction, cleaved to unyieldingly despite 45 years of evidence to the contrary. So either I pack alone and present him with a fait accompli, or I pack secret trousers in unlikely places, and hide T-shirts in toilet bags. Never believe anyone who tells you marriage is about honesty and togetherness.
The third bit is what undoes me: the books. Choosing what to take to read on holiday is a huge undertaking. The initial phase requires chasing down all the volumes currently in reading progress – in bags, on the bedside table, next to the bath, all around the sitting room – and discovering that there are eight. Pause to curse self-indulgent, scattergun approach to reading and therefore life.
Next, consider and reject all the books I should read. Gather instead all the books I want to read. Pause to curse moral and intellectual weakness. Contemplate resulting pile of 30 and whether they cover two weeks’ worth of possible moods, interests and environments. Add another 30. Calculate actual time available to read given that I remain on holiday a wife, mother and freelance journalist. Reflect that it might literally be the hope – represented by weight of books – that kills me. Reduce pile by eighttenths. Pause to curse life and my hostility towards the Kindle.
A holiday restores only that which is sapped by the preparations for it.
It is a zero-sum game. And we’re just driving to Norfolk. Anyone who manages the game of sevendimensional chess that is getting ready to fly abroad, I salute you. And, presumably, your Kindles.
In an incontrovertible sign that the end times are upon us – and who, at this point, does not greet such news with at least a small sigh of relief? – a giant, granite, unopened sarcophagus has been found during construction work in Alexandria, and it has apparently lain untouched since the early Ptolemaic period. Archaeologists are, of course, going to open it and almost certainly something unexpectedly potent, malevolent and fatal is going to fly out and kill us all. It’s just got that vibe, you know? I’m looking forward to it. It’s coming at the right time.