Technical Difficulties

Today felt much more calm than yesterday did. I think the first day jitters were wearing off for the students and for me as well. The real stand out moment of the day came from working with technology.

During the journalism class, Mrs. N wanted to show the first in a series of films on news media. She had them previously on tapes, but unfortunately there's a wrinkle to simply showing the tapes. One of our students is deaf, and trying to watch the tape and her interpreter would be very difficult. After a quick search, I discovered the videos were available for free on the web with closed captioning. Thinking the situation solved, we were all set!

And so I learned my first very important lesson of the day - before you try any lesson with technology, give it a run through first to make sure it works right.

Once we had everything hooked up, nothing happened. So I ran off and got the right cables and then - nothing happened. So we got the owner of the projector who explained to us that, first, you need to remove the lens cap.

Once we got the video showing with closed captioning (itself a challenge and a half) we couldn't change the video's size. This meant it was tiny. We resorted to tried and true methods of making a projection larger and tried pulling back the projector from the screen, but it didn't help much. The entire thing was really a fiasco. I found out way too late that I couldn't adjust the window size at all, and so it turned into a great big mess of tiny pictures and frustrated students and teachers.

It occurred to me only after the class that we could have asked the student if it'd be alright to show the video and set it up for her on the computer with the captions.

My last block of the day featured the freshmen again, somewhat less wound up today but still very excitable and loud. Today we went to the school's library and I got a chance to peruse the books. I am not a huge fan of Young Adult literature, but some of the book selections actually piqued my interest, and the students just ate them up. I was also really shocked to see a copy of Watchmen in the stacks. What high school offers Watchmen?

My current assignment is to think up an interesting class discussion on Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. I think I might try to pick up on some of the threads from the AP Lit. discussion on authenticity. It's always been my biggest thought around the text - is it more authentic to relate events as they happened or to take literary license and capture more of the emotion in the moment?