Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Feeling Old, School Edition: All About Filmstrips

This last weekend, while hanging around our campsite, I managed to strike up a conversation with a relatively young teacher. Somehow, I managed to bring up the topic of Filmstrips, and how didn't he remember watching them?

"A what now?", he asked.

A filmstrip. C'mon, you know what I mean. You drag out the little projector, place a cassette player next to it, pop in the tape, and hit play. Of course, there's one poor student who has the critical job of sitting next to the filmstrip projector and advancing it when he hears the Bing! on the tape. I remember distinctly hating this responsibility, as I'd get out of sync and the film would never match the audio. Talk about pressure.

He must have thought I was nuts. But seriously, am I that old? Guess so.

OK, younger generation, here's your lesson of the day. The following is a filmstrip. Note, when you hear the bing, imagine some poor student has to advance the player or nearly all is lost:

(View Video)

Think I'm making this stuff up? Not at all: Syottoys has quite the collection of educational filmstrips. Though, his are even more primitive than what I group on - they just contain subtitles that the teacher would read. Here's an example:

(View Video)

All I can say is, kids today have it so good.

2 comments:

  1. Sorry, Ben. I don't think I ever had the pleasure of watching a filmstrip live. :-)

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  2. What?! Well, as you can see, you are totally missing out.

    Actually, I guess the better question is - why the heck did I get to watch them as a kid? All I know is that David independently confirmed that we watched them, which means that I can't totally be making this memory up :-).

    Apparently you officially fall in the "Kids Today!" category, even though you aren't exactly a kid at the moment ;-).

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