HC Music that should be on Runtime Revolution

[geradamas at yahoo.com]

"Judy's reference to children not likely noticing the sound quality I
suspect must be referring to very young children because all the fifth 
graders at my wife's school all have the latest pop songs blasting out 
their iPhones when somebody rings, they seem to be very image concscious."

Here in Bulgaria, while a lot of Bulgarians are 'image conscious', and
a lot are plain and simple posers, a very large proportion of kids
do not have arty-tarty-farty mobile phones for the simple reason that
parents just don't have the money for much more than the bread and cheese.

Working on a daily basis with the 6 to 13 year-old crowd I cannot help
but be aware that some of the illusions that adults have about kids are 
seriously wrong!

1. Their inner / psychological / spiritual lives are at least as rich
and as complex as those of adults.

2. Their ears work better than those of us old f**ts.

My main problem is to stop kids clicking away as if they have some sort
of motor disorder while either a program or a media file loads; these
children WANT IT NOW, or, given the chance, even sooner. So
LATENCY of all forms is my bugbear. 

A piece of music that takes 10 seconds to load will not get heard.

A series of connected sounds that are d-i-s-c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d because
it takes yonks for them to pop in and out of the memory swap space will
only attract derision, and, from a pedagogical point of view, the kids'
concentration will be broken.

After all, a lot of teaching is not about fancy equipment and fancy
textbooks, it is about the ability to weave a spell about the subject
matter that holds the child so s/he doesn't take a quick mental
space-shuttle to the moon. Not so long ago I went over to one of the
grammar schools in Plovdiv, Bulgaria (where I stay) to see their fancy,
new data-projector with interactive white-board: marvellous equipment
with a classroom full of slack-jawed kids looking out the windows,
writing each other notes, fiddling with their mobile phones, and so on.

Perhaps a better teacher and a chalkboard would be a better bet!

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson.
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A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
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