Nostalgia

I don’t miss much from my former life in the UK but occasionally I encounter things which do invoke a pang of nostalgia.

A few days ago RTH and D were contemplating the mess of wiring in our ceiling in an attempt to install a light fitting. Of course as far as RTH and I are concerned all the wire colours are “wrong” leading to much use of Google and the internet.

It was just chance that I happened upon this video today but I do feel a twinge of nostalgia for good old fashioned British Engineering.

One of the most satisfying things I used to do was teach my students how to wire a plug correctly. Even the less academically gifted students seemed to really enjoy this task. It was practical and it was useful. I mourned the day it was removed from the syllabus (along with most of what I would consider to be “proper physics”)

For a while I still continued to teach it, along with other non syllabus but useful skills such as using a soldering iron to make a basic joint.

I even used to run informal contests whereby I’d give each group a copy of this chart and a bunch of random resistors and give a prize to the first group to arrange theirs in size order.

Of course then the nostalgia leads to me remembering why I quit teaching. I used to enjoy teaching the useful stuff and the actual physics. By the time I was done there wasn’t any of that left to teach