sutton050

I'm going to come back to this again... In 1989, in a dusty second floor science room at what was Top Valley Comprehensive School I sat down with my then classmates and we had our first sex-education lesson.  Mr Simpson the (unfortunately) body odour riddled and forever exacerbated physics teacher had to teach us young folk about masturbation and menstruation, and ultimately where babies arrive from. Not one picture of a stalk was had, not one allusion to fact, not one sugar coating, we had a video of (admittedly a cartoon of) a boy holding his penis and the narrator saying it's okay for this to feel good.  We had a young lady (again a cartoon) fondle herself and we were again told this was normal, we were shown putting condoms onto bananas to everyone's mirth as we'd mostly all seen and even used condoms before... This is Top Valley Estate bruv. And the last part of this talk was about periods.  We were all told all girls start to have periods, it is normal, we were ta...

Lets take a moment to read this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/41510170/both-sexes-should-be-taught-about-periods-together-at-school---charity And realise that this is 2017...  I'm not saying this to say, "OMG they're not teaching boys about this", but in 1989/1990... When I were at secondary school, we were taught about sex, and periods, and masturbation... Yes, we were.  I admit there was an awkward moment with Mr Simpson (the Physics teacher - who used to yell - and smell) but he showed us a video and gave us the basics. Then, in the lower school, there was a personal health conversation with Mrs Salisbury, where she talked to everyone, and explained how periods happen, they're natural, how much menstrual blood (on average etc) ladies deal with and all-sorts of things like that. I was eleven, I remember it... So why in 2017 are kids not being taught?... If I had to endure these jaw clenching moments, wondering my eyes around trying to not admit I was he...

Having a basic knowledge of Commodore Basic v2.0 I took to my A-Levels in 1994 and started to learn Pascal, both "Turbo Pascal" on DOS and "Personal Pascal" on my Atari ST. One of the first things I did, as most kids do is start to write a game, it was a 2D grid style war-game, 28x28 tiles to a map and maps stitched together, it was very roughly based on a table top game I had which itself was a dice & splice of the Guadalcanal Campaign of World War 2... Anyway, I had jungle, and grass, Desert and beaches, water and the tanks, and troop counters moved around, you could air-drop paratroopers into spots when you had earned enough points, and I last worked on it in around 1995 when I started to add Sound Blaster driven 16bit effects into it. But, I also needed tools, I was working on DOS, with no Windows - I didn't get Windows 3.1 until later that year - and at college the compiler only ran in DOS, to stop the compiler and loads Windows, then execute a GUI tool...

Here in the UK there have been several waves of trying to educate new generations as to the art of compute science, this started when I was a boy with the BBC Computer Literacy project and concluded soon after with a drought of interest from non-technical educators and politicians a like through until fairly recently. The BBC reports that there has been a low amount of uptake of new Computer Science GCSE studies. And I can believe this, however the neither the BBC nor government seems to even point as to why this is, they talk about pupil disengagement or lack of interest. I however contend that the government and educators and indeed the BBC completely fail to spot the elephant in the room, kids study not for jobs or skills, however they do study what is emphasised, IT has always been an "also ran" topic, it's not Maths, nor English nor seemingly as important in appearance as any other topic out there. In my day this was the case because few understood computing, today ...