Technolandy

Day 179 (of 2025/26) Nostalgia Burns…

Eras come to an end – even CBC is ending it’s annual tradition of Hockey Night in Canada… not that many watch it on CBC since the HD channels on Sportsnet are a bit more crisp and clear… and a neat pivot from when CBC was ‘the’ broadcaster to offer $$ to the NHL, but times have changed and live sports are one of the few reasons to not stream services (though my father in law insists on starting games later so he can fast forward commercials… despite my various apps giving me score updates regardless of where he is in the game… sigh… 

Education is good at nostalgia.  We like to think that we went through the apex of educational and pedagogical development, when really we have a lot of practices to try and mistakes still to be made. “Research” always makes me laugh because the variables in cohorts changes so much – when tracking grade 4’s (as we do with one of our provincial measurements) the class dynamics change wildly from year to year, and even comparing the grade 4s to their performance in grade 7 (using another provincial measurement) is great for individual comparisons, but cohorts change and people move! It’s not even comparing apples to oranges, its comparing Gala Apples to the Gros Michel banana (the banana sold in North America int he 1950s… since gone extinct and we are using the blander Cavendish banana… which is also scheduled to go extinct before this years kindy’s graduate!) 

Heck, in a twist of serendipity, in the background tonight, I’m watching the podcast/tv series Rich Eisen’s “This Was SportsCenter” show and Mike Greenberg just mentioned (serendipity) the power of nostalgia as we get older… but even the amazing sports shows of the 90s had to evolve… they would not get the viewers today in that format…  Nostalgia is a lot better to reflect back on that want to replicate… can’t forget that there has been a lot of segregation done in education… still a lot if you count private schools (bah dum dah). The good old days… weren’t.  

Want to go back to the era where the bullying may not have been on screens, but was still 24/7 – in comments, graffiti, threatening gestures… there’s a reason why eating disorders, self harm ideation and actualization, school avoidance, self medication, social and sexual exclusions and attacking, etc are not new on the education landscape… we just like to target the latest distraction… err tool, as the root reason rather than digging into societal reasons behind these bad behaviours. 

There was never any ‘one’ way to learn to read… nor any one effective way to do the maths… but some like to pretend there are positive memories connected to mad minutes and spelling tests. We have liked to try to archive ‘one’ pathway to graduation, based on a general cross section of course studies, but I like remind people that no matter how Blockbuster changed the store layout… they shoulda paid closer attention to Netflix – my metaphor for ‘big education’ and ‘AI & personal screens’. We don’t have ‘it’ (streaming education??) figured out yet, but the clientele are showing more and more than 1980s mindsets may have worked for us in our final decade-ish of public education, but less so as society and the world pivot… Blockbuster spent years optimizing the video store. Netflix changed the question entirely. Education sometimes feels like it’s spending enormous energy optimizing the video store while learners are already experimenting with the streaming service.

Nostalgia is useful. It reminds us where we’ve been, who influenced us, and what experiences shaped us.

But nostalgia isn’t a roadmap.

The “good old days” tend to get edited in hindsight. We remember the successes and conveniently forget the exclusions, the inequities, the dead ends, and the students who never fit the system particularly well.

Education should learn from its past, not become trapped by it.

The world keeps changing. Our learners keep changing. The tools keep changing. And while some people see uncertainty in that, I see opportunity.

If anything, this feels like the most exciting time to be in education. We’re still figuring out what comes next, and that’s exactly why I want to be here to see it.

Still think this is the most exciting time to be in education and I can’t way to see what comes up in my algorithm next! Am I hypocritical to wish for a return to #edchats?