Are you good at maths?

I have always been hopeless at maths. Slow, and easily confused. English was another matter, I was tested for IQ more than once and according to the school psychologist, scored very high, though I was never told what this score was. I was three or four years ahead of my classmates anyway and was also considered gifted at languages, though somehow I did not reach the levels of proficiency I could have hoped for. My comprehension skills always seem to lag, do speak at varying levels, four other languages. 

So my skills were uneven and the trouble with all this is still that for every gift, there seems to be something I am slower at that will trip me up.

I have always been fascinated by small gadgets and loved my very first Sharp pocket computer, graduating to Psion, then a Mio 550. But then one ofy students came to class in 2006 with her i-phones.....

No I don't programme or anything like it, I do find smartphone technology exciting, less thrilled to see how terminally it distracts some of the kids in the classes I teach. 

I have always been hopeless at maths. Slow, and easily confused. English was another matter, I was tested for IQ more than once and according to the school psychologist, scored very high, though I was never told what this score was. I was three or four years ahead of my classmates anyway and was also considered gifted at languages, though somehow I did not reach the levels of proficiency I could have hoped for. My comprehension skills always seem to lag, do speak at varying levels, four other languages. 

So my skills were uneven and the trouble with all this is still that for every gift, there seems to be something I am slower at that will trip me up.

I have always been fascinated by small gadgets and loved my very first Sharp pocket computer, graduating to Psion, then a Mio 550. But then one ofy students came to class in 2006 with her i-phones.....

No I don't programme or anything like it, I do find smartphone technology exciting, less thrilled to see how terminally it distracts some of the kids in the classes I teach. 

nexus9 said:

less thrilled to see how terminally it distracts some of the kids in the classes I teach. 

Yes.  I was reading that Melinda Gates's children don't have smartphones and only use a computer in the kitchen. Her husband Bill spends hours in his office reading books while everyone else is refreshing their homepage. The most sought-after private school in Silicon Valley, the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, bans electronic devices for the under-11s and teaches the children of eBay, Apple, Uber and Google staff to make go-karts, knit and cook. Mark Zuckerberg wants his daughters to read Dr Seuss and play outside rather than use Messenger Kids. Steve Jobs strictly limited his children's use of technology at home.

I have to own up and say I hate what the technology has done to society in general. People now seem to be permanently distracted by the devices.  It interferes with concentration, work, etc.  My colleagues at work are nearly all of the generations who've grown up with the technology and can't live without it.  We're not supposed to use our phones at work, but that doesn't stop them.  They're not doing their job properly.  It needs the managers to come down hard on them, but they tend to turn a blind eye.  They're meant to be there to do a job, not spend much of the day - as several of them do - fixated on social media, or checking dating apps.

On the other hand - the technology is designed to be addictive, and it certainly works.  Even some older people I know, in their 40s and 50s, are lost without their phones.