I’m going to wonder this for years — perhaps long after the chore is no longer mine, perhaps long after I’m in a different place in life entirely — but how does the organizing of a one day workshop take up so much time? My task these last few days, and for the next several days, will be to call teachers.
Do you know when the best time to catch teachers at work is? During the day.
Do you happen to also know what they typical spend their day doing?
Aren’t you surprised some office assistant somewhere in America hasn’t gone crazy and hacked up phone lines? After all, this is only the 6,428th time it has been said this school year, “She’s in class!”
So that was the morning. Emails and phone calls and searching for Email addresses and the proper person for whom to leave a message.
The afternoon I spent putting the final polish on the syllabus I’ll hand out tomorrow. I’m teaching an editing class this term. I’m giving spelling tests, among other things.
I don’t remember how this was received when I was in a similar class way back then, but I’m sure we thought the idea of a spelling test was a novel idea. And then we took those tests, carefully calculated to find the most challenging words in English or other languages that might one day be used by an American journalist. Having come full circle I’ve included some of those words on my list.
Tomorrow, on the first day of the class, I might also give a quiz. Set the tone. Or, as the hip kids say “Be THAT professor.”
I’m going to show a video, though, so I can also be THAT professor. And I’ll talk about typos in banners and semi-permanent paintings and … well, there is always this example if you really need one:
It was supposed to say “hopefuls,” but “when we’re typing and the computers freeze, sometimes it takes so long to unfreeze that we completely forget what we were trying to do when it froze,” explains the editor.
I’ve no doubt that was simply a horrible mistake. The Alligator is a fine paper. And the explanation strikes me as perfectly reasonable. The excuse could use a little more punching up. “We forget” might not satisfy the aggrieved parties.
We grilled out tonight and I reminded myself of a painful less. When lighting fire to the grill, be careful you don’t catch an ember in your eye.
I’d never forgotten that one, actually, it is always good to say out loud, however.
What I did forget was the exact inventory of what was going on the grill. Two pork chops, I thought, I can be economical with the briquettes. But I’d forgotten the corn until The Yankee came home and reminded me that I’d requested roasted corn. So there was an attempt to cook everything over the small mass of charcoal. That proved unsatisfactory. So I spread a few more of the magical black rocks that give fire on the other side of the grill. And now I have a flame discrepancy. So I let it burn and then covered the grill thinking I’d starve the fire. Which I did, right out.
So now nothing was grilling at the proper pace and, really, this is the worst part of my day. Life is so good.
The pork chops were good. The Yankee has this nice seasoning that we must now order online. Stores stopped stocking it, so messengers from Jakarta now deliver it to our door. It goes great with pork and is the sort of thing that makes you think it should stand well on any dish. But, then, if you put it on fish the salmon would stand up and say “Keep it on the swine, friend.”
The corn was a little under-done, but 45 extra seconds on a grill for a fresh ear of corn is not a catastrophe.
Last thing for the night is a fun new iPhone app I discovered. Storyrobe is a free app that let’s you make slideshows (as mp4s) from your photos. You record narration, control when the image flips and can share your project via Email or YouTube.
The finished product is a bit small, but this could be a useful app for a journalist on the go, or to share events with friends and family. Or even storyboarding jokes. We’ve been doing that tonight too. You’d have a hard time finding something free that can make you laugh for as long as this has done.
You have to know all of the ways you can use the tools you download. Knowing the silly ways are important, too.
