Mini-series: Education Extinct (Episode 5)
Today’s episode was chosen for me. Somebody nominated the overhead projector in a comment earlier this week, and I knew straight away that it was going to be the right way to finish the week.
All week I’ve been digging up the bits of school that have quietly gone extinct in a single working lifetime. Last one: the OHP.
It had a smell, didn’t it? Hot dust and warm plastic, and a fan labouring away underneath everything you said. You wrote on acetate with a pen that squeaked, your handwriting came out three feet tall and wobbling on the wall behind you, and if you leaned into the beam your own shadow swallowed the lesson. The bulb always went mid-lesson. There was always a spare somewhere in the school and it was never, ever where it was meant to be.
It’s in good company this week. The banda machine came up, and the purple fingers that went with it. Roger Red Hat. The cane, satchels, desks in straight lines, free milk in tiny bottles, lessons on the school TV. Every one of those was, at some point, simply how school was done, and now they’re stories we tell.
Here’s where I’ve landed after five days of this.
The OHP wasn’t a bad tool. It did a real job for decades, and then something better turned up, and then something better than that. The banda machine gave way to the photocopier. The computer on the trolley gave way to a device in every pocket. Whatever’s on your classroom wall today will be on somebody’s extinct list in twenty years, and honestly, that’s fine. That’s the job working as intended.
Because the tool was never the thing doing the teaching.
What made the OHP sing was a teacher who knew when to reveal the next line, when to cover it up, when to hand the pen to a child. And that’s exactly where we are with AI right now. It’s the technology every school is grappling with, and the ones who’ll get the most from it are the ones who understand it’s as much a question about people as it is about the tech. Curiosity, judgement, knowing what’s worth doing in the first place. The human edge, as I keep calling it.
Buy the kit, by all means. Then spend twice as long on the people using it.
That’s the week. Thank you for every nomination and every purple-fingered memory. And thank you for reading.
Verdict: extinct, and rightly. The teaching outlived it.