Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Outnumbered

Yesterday at CSU I tried to teach my class, which after all, is only an hour and 15 minutes long. First, I could not get the technology to cooperate. Then someone came in and said he was from (some unidentifiable acronym) and needed to make a rather long announcement to the students. He was a student himself, with a farmer in the Dell beard and scruffy face whiskers, wearing an absurd tee-shirt. I yielded the class to him, and listened as he reeled off an entire year's worth of social calendar events and yes, a scholarship, designed to tempt the students, all majors in a program for teachers in training, to take over the leadership positions in the organization of student government targeting people in this rather large major.
Meanwhile, I was wondering how I was going to get anything done, when I'd finally get to the part when they were ready to write this paper. Especially since some of the students seemed incredulous that I was really going to ask them to do this difficult work, which after all, the students at the community college level have been doing for years, while these are juniors in college at a university.
Finally, I got to teach for a while, until someone else, the guy from technology, who had come to fix the problems I was having putting links up for my students on Blackboard, interrupted again. And too soon, the class was over, and I'd gotten almost nothing done. Sigh.

2 comments:

Marly Youmans said...

Ah, well. It's not the whole course. Pearls take a lot of layers.

Robbi N. said...

That's true. At the end of class, I forgot to say, the librarian came in to help me put up Permalinks to articles I wanted to post on Blackboard! A teacher's work is never done, and it's only Weds.!