And now the final session. Actually, it was one of the ones I had
really looked forward too! iPods & English!

Again, we have been called to the front of the room, this time because the speaker is showing a PowerPoint show on his Powerbook for the session. The room is boiling hot and I really wish I were sitting on that table over there in the corner. I’ve grown weary of the laptop-on-my-lap arrangement. This room is tucked far in the back corner of the hotel, and there doesn’t seem to be any wireless in here. I’m trying to work in a text editor, and I can’t get it to wrap text, which I might add is driving me crazy. I guess that I will start hitting return. It’s so odd to try to remember that old typing skill of hitting return. I wonder if students even understand the idea of a “return”; for them, there is nothing to return. It took a while for the session to get started. The previous presenter took a long time to clean up and get out, and it’s taken a while to get the handouts and the computer setup. He has this habit of trying to make a joke about every interaction with every person. The kind of corny jokes your grandfather might tell. Jokes that don’t fit in the presentation, but finally we’re underway. He’s essentially reading through the slides, which he has given up copies of. Very basic and generic information (that I probably could have gotten from a commercial). Next slide is on his favorite uses for iPods. The first line: shopping with a shuffle. OMFG. I can’t believe what he just said to us. “My wife and shopping, well, you all know how women are. It’s not pleasant, and it’s not cheerful. I just shove on earphones and I listen while she shops.” How is it that I could let him speak such a thing to me and I haven’t gotten up and left this room. It’s the front row thing. I feel like I can’t get up and leave without being rude. But the thing is that comment was rude. Why is it okay for him to be rude to me, and not for me to get up and be rude in return? I guess it’s an issue of respect. We are supposed to show respect for our elders. We are supposed to respect presenters. When do we get to respect ourselves? It’s 1:45. The session is supposed to be over at 2:15. 30 more minutes? We’re on slide 7 of a 36 slide PowerPoint. All the information is incredibly basic, and I think I’ve just mentally checked out. There’s so little being said that there’s nothing to even type about. 1:57. I’ve just glanced back and noticed several people have left. I’m so fortunate. Bruce Ericksson just came in to remove some equipment. That gave me the chance to move back to the third row. As long as I feel that I have to stay, I may as well have the chance to put my feet up on the chair in front of me. 2:03. I wish that instead of a battery timer telling me how much more time in the session, I had a session timer telling me how much longer in this boiling room. 2:07. Walking around the room, showing us a family picture. 2:10. Next PowerPoint slide. “I don’t even know what this is, but I’ll share it with you. Podcasts which I think are visual sounds.” 2:13. “Apollo 13 scared me. The moonshot that went awry and killed all those astronauts. I believe in redundancy. In Apollo 13, they were working on improvisation, but I like all these things because they provide backups.” [The Apollo 13 astronauts didn’t die. Well, not during that flight anyway.] 2:14. “Just a footnote. How do I have the time to do all this? I retired 5 years ago.” o_O 2:16. The chair/recorder for the session has stopped the pain. Presenter says if we want to stay a few more minutes he can go through the rest of the slides. The recorder says that she will sign the Continuing Ed sheets. People trip over each other to get to her and get out of there. I’ve never been so disappointed in a session.

I admit that I wasn’t even sure if I should post this. With even the slightest bit of net know-how, you could figure out what this session was, who the presenter was. But here they are. More than anything, I think that the reason is that as I sat there with a group of young preservice or first-year teachers who needed their forms signed, I felt more than sorry for them. I felt responsible for them. I felt that I really should at the very least apologize for them. They came to find new ways to use iPods in their class. It’s definitely not what they got. I wished so much that there was a way to pull them all off to another room and talk to them about multimodal teaching in ways that would matter. Sigh. What a sad conclusion to the conference.

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction