Technology and Me

            I wondered if I was going deaf.  I could barely hear my son-in-law over my cell phone even though he was shouting.  No, I probably wasn’t going deaf because I could hear all the noises around me in the busy airport.  Blasted phone.  There must be something wrong with it.

            There was, I found out later.  The volume was turned down all the way.  The culprit?  Me.  I had been pushing the volume switch without realizing it.

            I was teaching in a new (to me) classroom and having the devil of a time with the overhead projector.  The screen was too high, so the square of light hit below it.  As I started to make a stack of heavy textbooks on which to stand the projector, a helpful student pointed out that I could adjust the beam height merely by swiveling the lamp head.

            That was the classroom where I discovered that coffee and overhead projectors don’t mix.  When I spilled my coffee on the glass surface, there was a pop and a hiss and no more light.

Those instances are not the worst, though, if for no other reason than they were single occurrences.  It took almost all of my nineteen years of teaching to conquer projection screens. 

In one of my favorite classrooms, someone had rigged a shoestring and hook to the screen handle, so you could attach the errant screen to one of the holes in the metal trim of the whiteboard.  However, the problem inevitably arose that once the hook was released, the screen shot up faster than Superman and flung the shoe string over the back of the white board.  I would call on a basketball player to retrieve it—far better than standing on a chair to do it myself.

In the SMART classroom (which meant the classroom with computer, overhead, projector, and movie-size screen), there were further challenges.  By then I had graduated from hand-printed overheads to typed overheads to power point presentations.  I was particularly proud of my power points when the equipment worked (another story) but the big screen posed a problem.  It took up virtually all of the white board space in front, which meant that sometimes I needed to release the screen to make room for writing on the board.

This large screen usually stayed down when I pulled on it.  However, it did not want to go back up.  More times than I care to admit, I asked for a volunteer to work the screen.  Eventually, though, I learned the technique to making it rise at least partway part of the time.

My most painful screen experience of all, though, was in an ancient classroom at Hoxie High School, where I taught an evening composition class.  I depended heavily on the equally ancient overhead because the white board was in such poor shape—it resisted erasing.  (I had to scrub with a ratty old rag and special spray cleaner to clean the board, and still, the shadows of other words lurked behind my new ones.)  So I used the overhead projector until one night, when preparing for class, I pulled down the screen and the whole mechanism came crashing down on my foot.

Nowadays, I don’t have to struggle with overheads or screens anymore.  It’s just answering calls on my fancy phone that’s a problem.