Month: February 2019

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Summary of Back In Time For School – Episode One

We watched Episode One which is summarised by the BBC as follows:

“Starting at the very close of Victoria’s reign they discover how national attitudes to class, race and gender filtered into the classroom, before entering the turbulent years between the World Wars. They experience lessons that seem bizarre by modern standards – from musket practise and mother-craft to deportment and duck herding – and take part in activities that we all remember from our own school days – the classic 80s cross-country run, the day Encarta enters British classrooms, and perhaps even master the puzzling gadget that was the 1960s slide rule.

Their experience begins in 1895. The smell of coal burners wafts down the corridor, and a portrait of Queen Victoria hangs proudly in the school hall. Our class discover what it was like for the lucky four per cent of children able to attend school in this period, when education was still seen as a preserve for the rich, but a handful of schools offered affordable places to ordinary families for the first time. In this age of Empire, the class comes to understand just how much attitudes have changed, and are shocked to discover that Victorian notions of Empire and citizenship are very different to modern ideas. School dinner is a silver-service affair, presided over by the teachers, whose authority is absolute. Alien to our 21st-century pupils’ eyes and palates, the menu offers them fish pie with a tapioca pudding, a meal the Victorian schoolchild would have been grateful for, at a time when many pupils worked part-time to support their family’s income and food supply – as some of our boys find out. With the advent of flash-photography powder, their chemistry teacher introduces them to a new scientific formula with an explosive bang, and one of the pupils is disciplined in an era-appropriate fashion by having his left hand tied to the desk.

With the death of Queen Victoria in 1902, the pupils and teachers enter into the Edwardian era. Segregation is common place in schools at this time, so our pupils are separated for gender-specific learning. While the boys enter into the possibility of the professions by learning Latin, the girls are tasked with more ladylike lessons – making beds, cleaning and putting up wallpaper, as they are taught the art of the housewifery. In 1904, the class and teachers gather with friends and family to celebrate Empire Day, a pageant common in schools throughout the Edwardian era. With students playing the roles of Peace and Britannia, their classmates flank them with banners proclaiming the reach of the British Empire, before singing the national anthem.

Towards the end of the era, the threat of war means the boys are trained in musket practise and learning to fight. The building desire for democracy has begun, and the girls come to understand how important the vote was to British women, as they learn the art of self-defence Suffragette style. As their time-travels draw to a close in 1914, and the pupils reflect on their Victorian experience, the school holds a prize-giving ceremony. A mark of academic achievement, which seeks to imbue the children with a sense of pride and responsibility, in order for them to fulfil their roles in society, in the testing and troubling years that will follow.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bx7lxt

Here are our thoughts following the programme:

  • Only four per cent of children able to attend school in this period. Feels disgusted mainly, but a small part relieved as school didn’t sound so nice.
  • Most children left school at 11 to go to work.
  • One of the pupils is disciplined in an era-appropriate fashion by having his left hand tied to the desk. Literally something he was born with. We feel this was inhumane and insane.
  • Girls were taught the same as boys up until 1902 when there was a change in the school system. Science and maths were very important subjects but replaced by Latin for boys and Needlework for girls. Children were now taught separately according to gender.
  • Empire was a key topic in Geography. Empire Day was celebrated by 55,000 schools and 7 million children across the globe. We remarked on how racist attitude was taught as fact and how shocking that was.
  • We had a change of monarch in 1901. Edward VI, the son of Queen Victoria became King. We think the children would have been upset by her death. We read more about mourning in the Victorian period here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/understanding-grief/201812/death-and-mourning-practices-in-the-victorian-age
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How to combine Greek Mythology, modern technology and English writing skills in one blog post!

MasterKAF has been working on a great article as part of his Classics studies on Ancient Greece. We spent time researching the myth of the Trojan horse and being as he loves all things tech, it was not long before we were making comparisons with the modern-day variety. We decided to use a “Compare and Contrast” framework from Teachit English, a really good resource for literacy and creative writing lesson plans. Here is the final article.

The meaning of the Trojan Horse, then and now. Discuss.

The legend of the Trojan Horse, told in the Iliad, by the Greek poet Homer gives an account of the war between the Mycenaeans and Troy (in modern Turkey). Iliad technically means “Troy Story” in modern English, no need to thank us for that pun, thank this particular video from Overly Sarcastic Productions instead!  After 10 years of fighting, Agamemnon’s army finally defeated Troy by trickery. Greek soldiers hid inside a wooden horse, which was given as a gift by the “defeated Greeks” and towed into the city by the triumphant Trojans. At nightfall, the Greeks emerged to capture the city. Today a Trojan Horse is usually a digital construct designed to look normal and harmless, it’s often disguised as legitimate software so it can easily infiltrate computers, often private computers. Here are some further contrasts and comparisons between the ancient and the modern.

The horse was made of wood and contained soldiers. The horse would have been very large and everyone could see it plainly. Modern Trojan horses whereas, are not on a physical plain and are often designed to not be large and obvious and do not contain soldiers obviously!

There are at least nineteen different general types of modern Trojan malware, while there was only one Trojan horse in history. 

Users are typically tricked by some form of social engineering into loading and executing modern Trojans on to their computer systems. Similarly, the residents of Troy were tricked to letting the Trojan horse in but not directly interacting with it. If they had the plan would have failed. 

Trojan-Spy is another type of Trojan which can spy on your computer.  Yet, in the myth of the Trojan horse, the Greeks did not spy in any way, but it did let an army sneak passed the defences of Troy.

There was a Trojan-like programme called Zeus first identified in 2007, often used to steal banking information. By 2009 it had been used to compromise 74000 FTP accounts on websites like The Bank of America, NASA, Play.com, Oracle and Amazon. Whereas, in actual Greek mythology Zeus (called Jupiter by the Romans) was the king of the gods.

A type of Trojan called “Backdoor” gives malicious users total remote control over the computer allowing them to do anything they want. It can unite a group of computers into a botnet or zombie network.  This compares quite well with the original Trojan horse since it has a similar purpose. Although it would not literally result in the opening of a gate it would periodically disable the firewall to allow other malicious software in. 

More often than not, in modern times when referring to the term “Trojan Horse” (especially digitally) it does not compare with the ancient Greek mythos. 

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Yet again, gaming and learning are one and the same!

Honestly, it never gets old! Every time I think that MasterKAF and I have explored all the possible ways that gaming and learning can be combined, we trip across some more examples.

MasterKAF was telling me all about a game that helped explore the evolution of a species from cellular level right through to sophisticated civilisation. “Spore” is according to Wikipedia, “a 2008 life simulation real-time strategy single-player sandbox God game developed by Maxis and designed by Will Wright, released for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Covering many genres including action, real-time strategy, and role-playing games, Spore allows a player to control the development of a species from its beginnings as a microscopic organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. It has drawn wide attention for its massive scope, and its use of open-ended gameplay and procedural generation. Throughout each stage, players are able to use various creators to produce content for their games. These are then automatically uploaded to the online Sporepedia and are accessible by other players for download.”

It got us to talking about the evolution of all sorts of things and how the science fiction of the game compared to the science accepted understanding here on earth; it turns out there was quite a lot to think about. I did not believe that my son who often finds biology a dry-ish subject, could talk with such animation about single-celled organisms and how they could develop differently into bipedal or quadrupedal animals. Honestly, they were his words and not mine. So I enquired as to what had led on to this topic and he reminded me about the YouTube channel we found a while back called Kurzgesagt and that he often listened to their shows whilst working on his computer. If you have visited their channel before then a thoroughly recommend it.

It has meant that the prospect of purchasing a microscope and actually getting down to some actual biology just became a fun prospect, rather than the chore he thought it was going to be. I am so blessed that we can educate in the way that we need to so that MasterKAF gets the grounding he needs in a way that will leave a lasting impression. Every child should have this chance!