21 September 2006

I have been her kind.

I have become the woman I never wanted to be.

The teacher fumbling with the a.v. equipment or relying on a handy student to get the movie to start.

Most of my undergraduates weren't around for those slide shows with cassette tape soundtrack, or the unruly filmstrips of yesteryear that on good days would go slap-slapping like wild until some boy pulled the plug and took over. I always told myself that I would never be the audio visually inept teacher, but here I am.

Last year I taught in the fancy Technologically Enhanced Classrooms which were understandably daunting. Give me a computer and I will be right at home, but a projector, and an electronically retractable screen...eek!

This year I'm in some outdated and ugly rooms, which makes me feel right at home pedagogically, but I'm still not at home when the equipment rolls in and everyone is looking at me to get it started.

Perhaps talking about it--writing about it--will help.

4 comments:

Chris Mansel said...

Oh do you remember the aged filmstrip of They Said It Couldn't Be Done from our childhood? I can still remember the sound of the two big reels spinning and wondering when the machine would breakdown.

marybid said...

I think that the possibility of the machine breaking was half the fun of watching film strips in school!

Anonymous said...

I miss the bygone days of the filmstrips with cassette audio that would beep when it was time to advance to the next frame. It was a good day when I was the kid in charge of advancing the strip.

marybid said...

Yeah, it seems like a match made in heaven: AV geek meets AV goofball.

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