Sunday, 6 October 2013

Fifty years on…


Back in the summer, I was looking at my dad’s notes from his Forest Technician course back in the late 1960s. Two big green 3-ring binders – stuffed with hundreds of pages, all done on a typewriter on thin paper, with charts and sketches in coloured felt pens.
It’s hard to get my head around the fact that he, and all the students at all the schools from his time and before, worked without ’puters, printers and the internet. That’s prehistoric! The time investment in the notes alone would have sunk me!

But there’s more than hard labour in those 40-plus-year-old notes – and that’s the course content.  I wrote in an earlier post about how one job description today covers a long and expanding list of different employment and career choices in the turf management industry. But I think I’m correct to say that our industry was narrowly focused, and much more limited in applications and options back then. So, looking in the rear-view mirror, as it were, in those old binders, I wondered how much cross-over of information went into, and maybe still does contribute, to building the modern courses we’re taking at Guelph U.

Some of the binders’ content has barely changed; e.g. learn 65 trees and bushes by leaf, twig, bud, fruit and bark.  That’s still plain old skull work today – but the old courses also covered a number of topics in depth that, to my rookie eyes, relate directly to what we will be learning.       
Soils and Geology, for instance… or Forest Pathology (diseases and parasites), or Silviculture, from raising seedlings to reforestation. Obviously,  the topics were focused on trees not turf, and a lot of new knowledge has been learned since then, but the core information was there. And I like the thought that I’m learning along the same paths nearly half a century later.

Also…  I REALLY like the fact that I have my ’puter and the internet to work with.

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