It's Serious

 

This is a very old picture and I am glad I can scan it and put it in Picassa before
it totally destroys. Maybe a professional can one day fix it and make a new
picture without all the creases.
The fella on the right, is My Dad.
Only God knows what they are learning there. Physics? Electricity?
He wanted to become an Engineer like his Dad but the war interfered.
My Dad was always great with his hands and knew so many things .
There was nothing he couldn't design and create in both wood and metal.
He could build houses, install electric wiring, install a heating system.
and nothing ever broke like in the new houses they build today
with so called professionals doing it.
People were so well trained in Europe.
He machined a bronze lamp I still have today .
The old schools knew how to teach and when these immigrants came to Canada,
they never had a problem landing a job because employers knew, they knew their stuff.
The French people in Quebec were angry about this but their education consisted mainly
of catechism.
My Dad was great at precision work and detail, knew his motors too
He never wanted to teach me. He said my hands should always be clean
and I should grow up to be a lady.
 I had a lot of problems with him when it came to wearing pants.
He just never liked it
But I loved to watch him work around the house and I still keep his old
oil can because I feel so close to it. lol
I spent many years handing stuff to him and this was one great oil can.
While I watched, I secretly learned lol
From the picture above, one could see the dedication and
 a real keen desire to learn, by these students.
Everything they did was serious.

When I was going to High School, my Dad would take my math book
and give me nausiating lectures about how they learned all this stuff in grade school .
He made it sound like it was my fault I wasn't way ahead in math but I told him
this is the school curriculum and he was quite upset to learn
the kids were so far behind in math in this country.
He expected a lot more from schools .
If he only knew our teachers cared more about unions and salaries than teaching.lol
We were graduating and our teachers would come in and put their feet on the table,
tell us to get into groups while they read the stock market report in the paper.
Of course no one did any work and they didn't care.
In those days we couldn't complain to the Office like the kids do today.
The kids are a lot more vocal today.


I remember my Dad telling me a story about the time the kids got together and
 built a glider plane
out of wood and attached it to an huge elastic band.
They tried to get it to fly with a person inside but it crashed. lol
Where they got all this material to do it is another story. lol

Everything in my household was about learning.
Languages, art, sewing, science, music.
I spent my summer on my balcony with a bushel of apples reading so many books,
most of them classics and I just couldn't get enough.

Before all this new technology, we could grasp onto things and learn them properly slowly,
without them being corrupted by different interpretations by different people.

We read the book, learned about the author, tried to see why he wrote it,
 what kind of person he was.
What time in history he lived in.
It was all so romantic learning about all these people
and a comedy, even when they froze, suffered, starved.
 There was always something special
between people you could relate to and thus
have understanding in things such as patience, charity,forgiveness and love.
The authors took you into peoples' heads and brought to life an unbelievable,
shattering story of a life in a moment of time.
To enjoy a book these days like this, is rare.
There is just no time and then we wonder why we have hyper kids.? lol

So give me an old book, anytime.
xoxoxoxoxoxo