Viral Techie!

Virus are prehistoric and, in a sense, I was prehistoric as far as teaching goes. I will be 52 years old shortly, and this is my 29th year as a teacher. That, for the even less mathematically inclined than I , means I have been a teacher for six more years than I HAVEN’T been, and twelve of those pre-teaching years were spent in FCPS classrooms as a student.

I remember bumping down the unpaved streets in an archaic school bus, passing farmers in the midst of their mid-morning chores. I remember, as a student, being ushered into meeting areas where leviathan TVs were hauled in on giant metal stands to show the latest episodes of “Free to Be You and Me” or “3–2–1 Contact” or “The Big Blue Marble” . I also remember the glee one felt when selected to be the on to advance in class films when the tape recording that accompanied the film strip went “Bing”.

I started teaching before we had emails and when attendance was taken on Scantron forms. Slowly, education evolved, and I recollect mammoth desktop computers accompanied by brightly colored floppy disks becoming the new modality for organizing and storing materials or utilizing word perfect to print out blocky blue student handouts on waxy paper. All grading was done by hand, and there were as many ways to configure grades as there were teachers in a building, leaving administrators to just have to take it on faith that you graded fairly.

I remember when there were NO Sols!

But more to the point, this virus, evolving from eons of predecessors , has knocked me forward in teaching.

I used to get up at absurdly early hours to get to the copier because I didn’t KNOW , literally until a month ago, that with GC you can just out assignments in queue and they would just arrive for your students! Sure, some of the younger teachers in my school tried to teach me, but I was stuck in my ways- a prisoner to what had worked before- steadfastly refusing to move forward on the grounds that technology was too complicated for a fogey like me to embrace. I was like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, mired into my old ways by figuring out ways to avoid coming into the light.

I have three kids 15, 12, and 5…yes, 3- not a typo, and yes I will be 52 in days and had it not been for the virus, I never would have taken the time to learn all the cool new stuff I have learned: I can edpuzzle, I can peardeck, I make google slides like a boss, I can padlet, and I had group presentations that went swimmingly this past week on BBCU.

So, for all of the negatives this has caused, there have been positives for me. I am the antithesis of Gatsby after he lost Daisy: I am seeing the education world through different eyes now, and that which looked horrifying, tedious, and complex now looks beautiful and energizing.

For younger teachers, this experience can’t be the same. You knew all the tech coming in, so the absence of in person must be even more poignantly felt. One day, you will be like me though, and I hope it doesn’t take a prehistoric, microscopic germ to thaw you out of stagnancy as Covid has done for me.

As an English teacher, I appreciate the irony: two relics of the past collided in order to open doors to the future!