I buy, sell, and collect old tools, especially wrenches. I can tell you that the old ones ( some over 100 years old) were much better built and built to last longer than modern wrenches.
In demonstrations, I tell people that the “lifetime guarantee” offered by modern wrench makers simply means they will give you a new one WHEN it breaks.
This doesn’t mean many of the old wrenches didn’t succeed, nor that some modern ones aren’t better designs, just commenting on durability.
I have a few of those wrenches. While it is true they will never break, I think there are two reasons for this. First off they have a head that is about 1/2 the size of the state of New Jersey, and secondly because of this, it is hard to break a tool that you can’t find a use for.
I freely admit that you can buy absolute shit tools that come with a lifetime warranty, but, in almost 40 years of working on cars, I have broken exactly zero Snap-On wrenches. I have turned a couple in for warranty due to chipping chrome, but never a broken wrench. Need I mention that the heads on the Snap-On wrenches are small enough to actually fit on the nuts and bolts that are installed on a car.
With that said, I am sure they built shit tools back in the day also.
First, I’m with you all the way on the car thing. It’s also true that American auto quality hit rock bottom in the '70’s and '80’s. At the time, the American manufacturers acted like they didn’t want to be is business in 40 years and they are almost accomplishing that goal. But we digress. . .
As for tools, as I recall, there weren’t a lot of crappy tools around in say, the '50’s. However, tools were horribly expensive. A lot of people didn’t work on their own car because the couldn’t afford the tools. Snap-On built their business on extending credit to mechanics.
Then, cheap imports started to come into the country. They had horrible quality and were finished very poorly but they were affordable. This situation created the distinction of owning quality vs. cheap imports and it extended to a lot of consumer products. Now, the foreign factories produce quality tools that are nicely finished and are very affordable. The price of tools in stated dollars is about the same as it was 50 years ago but those dollars are worth much less today. Tools have actually become a bargain.
Ah, thats well and good, but these days the teacher can write all over the board, and with just a “tap” erase everything. All without having expensive permanent slides. The teacher makes a slideshow on his computer, the student can download it from an online source or put it on a flash drive and take it home rather than wasting paper copying it like a happy little robot.
I wouldn’t deny that your board and OH projector is more “durable” in many ways, but there is a reason it has been replaced. Convenience.
If it’s something the student should already have written down, it’s going to be in the textbook. Taking notes is part of the process.
Aren’t you contradicting yourself? And in any case, where is the support for kids with dyslexia? Sight problems? Those who miss every third lesson for reasons not of their own making? These problems are much more easily tackled by a student in their own time or with support at the right pace if the material is available electronically.
And that is so utterly bogus, too–why not charge a quarter more for a box, and put in a decent prize?
Just a note about whiteboards: You don’t need to use any fancy solvents on them, unless you use fancy solvents on them. New whiteboards have a coating on them which makes them erase easily, but that coating can be removed by the harsh cleaning solutions. Once the coating is removed, you need to keep using the cleaning solution, because things won’t erase easily any more. Admittedly, even with the coating intact, something left on the board for a long time will be hard to erase completely, but when that happens, it can still be cleaned off with plain ol’ H[sub]2[/sub]O, just like a chalkboard.
As for the ease of writing on them, it seems to be mostly a matter of what you’re used to. If you grew up with the low-friction whiteboards, it’ll be easier to write neatly, or draw precision diagrams on them, but if you grew up with the high-friction chalkboards, those’ll be easier. I’m young enough to prefer whiteboards, but some of the professors I’ve worked with have lamented the loss of the chalkboards, which were so much easier to write on.
On the surface this seems a valid response, but teaching methods have changed, at least for me. I graduated High school in 1995 but didn’t start college until 2003. The notes on the board are gone through so fast you cannot write them down (I write very fast too), so you follow along, read the book, and when it comes time to study, if you want to study the notes, you have to get them in electronic format. Or if you form up with another student and he takes the first half of the slide, and you take the second half or something. Most people just get the electronic format.
The physical handwritten notes are for comments the teacher says that aren’t reflected in the book or the notes. Which in my classes seems to amount to a lot. My first mistake was not writing everything the teacher said that wasn’t in the notes, and not being able to study them at a later date, and thus missed the questions on the exam.
Teachers don’t put notes on the board to be copied verbatim anymore, at least where I go to school. Teachers put the notes on the board but don’t repeat them and want you to write them down, that is archaic. Now they put the notes on the board, and online, talk about related items, sometimes going over points in the slide, but not word for word, and they don’t put EVERYTHING in the notes. That is why you have to be there.
Power plants are definitely an area where newer is better. I cannot think of any older style/type of equipment which was more reliable than what plants buy now. Conveyor bearings used to be a “replace every 6 month” thing, and now they’re lasting 5 years. Large frame motors (4160V) used to need rewinding or replacement in 5-10 years - now, they’re “lifetime”. Some equipment, such as that exposed to corrosive/alkaline environments, used to be a common replacement item, and now is rare to replace. To add to this, failures are now much more often “soft” - that is, you can see that bearings are going and replace them when you have a scheduled maintenance outage, instead of them just failing and bringing the plant down in the middle of a hot summer day.
Turbines, especially gas turbines, have seen major increases in efficiency. When I started in the business, there was the mantra “gas turbines aren’t for baseload, they’re too unreliable”. Well, those days are long past, except from an economic (fuel cost) standpoint, and you can find innumerable gas turbines spec’d for baseload.
Unless you had used a permanent marker by mistake.
Or sometimes you erased the wrong thing, or smeared something you had wanted to keep.
Or somebody could trip over the power cord.
Or you could drop your transparencies and get them all out of order.
I don’t think whiteboards are perfect- I really wish they could come up with a good whiteboard marker that didn’t STINK (am I the only one who hates the smell of those things?) and could be erased easily no matter how long it had been up there. But the overhead projector had its problems…
I definitely prefer chalkboards to whiteboards. There wasn’t one board in the chemistry department that didn’t have permanent markings on it afteer two years. You can forget about the ones actually in the labs because some moron always wipes the protective coating off with acetone. The markers go dry so fast that finding a usable marker when it was needed was unlikely.
As for the electronic methods described, I haven’t seen them. In my experience these like these quickly become dated and have to be replaced regularly for compatability reasons. Powerpoint is fine as long as your adaptors fit, but I hated when my instructors used it. It is very detatched. I prefer a chalk-talk any day. To me, taking notes was part of the process.