Goodbye Noughties and hello - tens? Twenty-tens? Teens?

The new year has certainly let us know that it has arrived with the severe weather conditions we have experienced. Although the school grounds have certainly looked very picturesque, they have been quite dangerous under foot and hence the reason for delaying the start of the new term. We have certainly had to use the technology available to us in order to keep all stakeholders informed about the situation and to send work home to pupils. At times I was being informed via Facebook of decisions I was supposed to have made before I even made them!

However as we said goodbye to the first decade of the 21^st Century and hello to the new decade, what will be the legacy of the noughties?

During the noughties people became text addicts, twitter arrived, there was a 'war on terror', WAGS, ASBOs and chavs made an appearance. It was goodbye to Teflon Tony and hello to America's first black president. People judged their worth on how many friends they had on Facebook and the world economy crashed to its worst recession since the '30s. Technology certainly played a very important part of our lives in the noughties.

If you were to assemble a collection of devices dating from around 2000 to help illustrate how much has changed - e.g a first generation ipod, a Nokia 'Matrix' slider phone or the first Canon Ixus digital camera - to someone as old as I am, 2000 seems like yesterday, so it is amazing to find how antique these goods feel like. The ipod was a chunky brick, with no colour screen, the camera provided 2-megapixel snaps and the 'phone seemed incapable of going on line.

In the last decade we have seen all sorts of technologies become obsolete as the pace of change has accelerated.

The cathode ray tube is becoming a distant memory for many as TVs have become flatter, bigger and high definition. VHS has disappeared from most living rooms, to be replaced first by DVD and perhaps now by Blu Ray (though that too looks like an interim technology) and increasingly by IPTV such as the iplayer. Big music systems with CD players and separate amplifiers are also vanishing quickly, with docks for portable players and streaming music devices popping up in many homes. And, of course, more and more 'phones are now smart 'phones, with users rushing to install applications that help them run their lives or simply enjoy themselves on the move.

We may moan about unsatisfactory broadband services and look enviously at countries like South Korea, but living in a connected world became a reality in the noughties.

What will the next decade be called and what will it have in store for us? We did not actually get round to naming the noughties until the decade was in its autumnal years. And so perhaps the same will happen in 2010; perhaps we are about to enter the nameless years, a fuzzy, ill-defined age while the 2010s works out just what they would like to be called.

Whatever the next decade will be called it will have just as many, if not more, changes and challenges for people to face as the last decade did, many involving technology..

Perhaps it is fitting that the top single at the end of the noughties and the beginning of the new decade was Joe McEldery's version of 'The Climb'.

As the words of the song remind us 'there's always going to be another mountain' and we're 'always going to want to make it move' but no matter how hard the challenge is we have to 'be strong and just keep pushing on' as its 'the climb' itself that is important and can be enjoyable.

However whatever mountain you climb, and no matter how hard the challenge is, with the right attitude you will get to the other side.

One subject I have taught for many years is Mathematics. The beauty of Mathematics is that formulae can be derived and applied to give you the correct answer. Here is a formula to ensure that you can achieve 100% in life.

If

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

is represented as:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Then H -A- R- D- W- O- R- K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

And K- N- O- W- L- E- D- G- E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But A- T- T- I- T- U- D- E
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

So it is a mathematical certainty that while Hard work and knowledge will get you close, the right Attitude will get you there!

In wishing you all a Happy New Year and success in all that you tackle, I hope that you will approach the challenges of the next decade with an open mind and the right attitude.

Posted 09/01/10