After five years teaching English in a junior high school on the west end of town, I applied for a position at the brand new junior high on the east side. The principal told me, "We have a fiber-optic backbone!" as though that were a selling point. I didn't know what she was talking about, but she hired me anyway. I went from a school whose idea of cutting edge technology was a single Apple IIE in the teacher workroom to a school with two full computer labs with Internet access and a word processing program that didn't have a blue background. The computers at the new school even used mice, so I had to learn to point and click.
It quickly became apparent that no one at the new school really knew what to do with all this cutting edge stuff. In fact, it took most of the faculty the entire first year the school was open just to get their heads around the concept of e-mail. (It used to drive me nuts when my colleagues would
print all their e-mail, even the most trivial stuff, just so they could read it from paper rather than a computer monitor. It seemed to defeat the purpose.)
So for a long time, we had a lot of technology that we didn't know how to use. And then came Johnny Wilcox. He was an eighth grader, and he knew more about the computers in our lab than anyone on our staff. He was a bright kid who had always hated English, probably because he'd been asked to diagram one too many sentences. Rather than have him do a traditional research project, I had him develop a training manual for the computers, so the other students (and I) could learn how to use all the stuff. The next year Jeff Stettler, who is surely a hacker somewhere by now, taught me all about Windows, copying, pasting, right-clicking, file paths, directories, and even a little DOS. When I was confident in my ability to run a computer without breaking it, I bought one of my own: a Pentium 90. (This was in the days when Pentium 120s were still catching fire and 1 gig of hard disk memory was so huge it seemed inconceivable that anyone could ever need so much.) I had a 14.4 dial up modem. I got online at home and put Johnny and Jeff's lessons to good use, with occasional stops at the Pamela Anderson web site just for fun.
I have to admit that I felt like a
New World Man because I remembered a time when I figured my grades with a roll book and a calculator, but--unlike most other teachers on my staff--I was eager to leave that behind. E-mail quickly became my primary means of communication with anyone else who had access. (And I never printed it.)
I was assigned (by default) to be a school sysop and webmaster -- again, this was back in the days when WYSIWYG web programs were in their infancy, so I learned enough .html to scrape together a school web site that was little more than window decoration, but it impressed the hell out of the district administrators at the time. There were no ftp programs running on the district servers, so whenever I wanted to update a web page, I had to save it to a floppy disk (no CD burners existed then) and drive it to the district office to be loaded.
The fact that I had built a web site (pathetic though it was) made me the "computer guru" of the school, and I soon became the resident troubleshooter. Having solved many problems on my own computer, I could help the elders (who had no intention of ever leaving the 20th century behind) with their own problems, most of which could be solved with a re-boot or by pushing the power button on the monitor.
By 1996 I was very experienced with the Internet, and at that point I started asking my students to use it as an educational tool. I had a classroom web page on which I included some web-based assignments, but for the most part it still hadn't caught on with most of them. I remember the first chat room I visited was the day OJ Simpson was acquitted. It was a madhouse. LOTS OF SCREAMING GOING ON THAT DAY! Angry opinions on both sides. I remember thinking that if all these people could actually see and touch each other, blood would be spilt.
Shortly after that I received my first instant message. When the little window opened on my screen and interrupted my (three-hour) download of what I thought would be Miss March but actually turned out to be a picture of a large white rabbit, I almost had a heart attack. It was from a friend who I had hooked up with at my ten-year high school reunion. The message said simply: "Is that you?" Vague, I know, but we ended up having lots of long IM sessions that summer despite the fact that she was in Seattle and I was in Ogden.
I was never much of an online gamer. I always felt it was such a waste of time that I couldn't justify spending so many hours on it when I could have been, oh...I don't know...playing with my children. And it was around this time that my then-five-year-old daughter got a reading game and learned to use the computer herself.
My skills with the Internet and social software developed not because of any training session I attended--and there were a lot of them--but because I had an inherent desire to reach out via this new medium. I had always been fairly awkward in social groups, preferring a small circle of very close friends, and I was often more comfortable writing my thoughts and feelings than I was speaking them. (Still am.) I was suited to use this technology to reinvent much of my life and career, which I did without really thinking about it. Sadly, most people are not that way, even now that computers are part of the daily operations of all walks of life. Most people prefer to talk to you on the phone rather than actually read an e-mail carefully and respond precisely. I'd rather write. Somehow I think it is better mental exercise than talking even though it is not as immediate.
Most of what I learned, I learned because I was not afraid to make mistakes. When that damned error message popped up, I'd click whatever I had to to make it disappear. And since I was learning from my mistakes, I learned a lot because I made a lot of mistakes. The same applies with discussion boards and blogs, both of which I am incorporating into my online Honors English program this year. I still am not totally sure how it all works, but I'm going to have the students plunge in and lead me along.
I can't imagine life without the Internet now. My master's degree was completed almost completely online. My
classroom calendar is exclusively online now; I don't even have a roll book for my classes anymore. I communicate with my parents online more often than any other way. I get close to 50 e-mails a day (150 if you count all the SPAM), and spend at least two or three hours in front of the computer. My family uses it almost as much, even
my seven-year old son.
And this is one of three blogs I now have going for various purposes.
That about sums it up...for now.
*<%^)
