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Getting schooled by tech troubles

4 min read

Each Wednesday night at six, I begin three of the most grueling hours of my week. If it weren’t for my son standing by, the evening might be an embarrassing mess.

Wednesday nights I teach writing to university students in a building both remarkably state-of-the-art and hopelessly primitive. The classroom was recently updated to include a huge flat-screen TV and a computer from which to work. I’m able to put my lectures on the screen, and can share student work for our class critiques. It’s a setup my own teachers couldn’t dream of back when they were lugging overhead projects and writing on the chalkboard.

My university classroom has everything a teacher would need. The problem is getting hooked into it all.

Accessing my documents requires about 1.2 million steps – OK, three – but it’s tedious. In the final step, I enter a password, and the university texts a special code to my phone. By this point I have been entering codes and numbers and codes and numbers, and all I need is that last code before liftoff.

And I’m still not there.

The classroom is in a building so sturdy there is no cellphone reception. To receive the final code, I must scamper out into the hallway and hope the text finds my phone. Last night my scampering took me down the hall, through the study lounge and out the doors to the sidewalk.

I then dash back through the doors, through the lounge, down the hall and into the classroom, where I enter the code and hope the function hasn’t expired. In which case I must start all over again, as I did last night.

By the time I begin the class, I have already run a half mile – in dressy academic attire; I am wilted and sweaty.

And it would be even worse if it weren’t for my son, a student in the front row.

He signed up for the class without checking to see who would be teaching it. I’m still not sure if he would have signed up for the class anyway, but there he is, thank goodness. He is a whiz with cameras and computers, and sets me up. When the inevitable glitches happen during class, he pops up to fix them.

It must be strange for him, having Mommy calling on him and critiquing his work. Before the semester started, I asked how he wanted to handle the mother-son connection in class: should I let on? Should I pretend there was no connection with that kid who hands me a cold soda at the beginning of every class?

“Let’s keep it quiet,” he said. That lasted about 15 minutes, until I called the roll and a student recognized that the names matched.

“Some of my friends already knew,” he said. It’s the kind of campus where kids in the same major all know each other.

The class has allowed me to understand my kid in a way most parents don’t. I hadn’t observed him in a classroom since he was in kindergarten. He’s funny, is quick to participate, and is not shy about correcting me when I’m wrong. That part I always knew about him.

There’s a family history of the teacher-parent thing. My mom taught music at my elementary school, and later, at California University, I took my dad’s music theory class. I got an A.

I don’t know what my son’s grade will be – we’re only halfway through the semester. But if sense of humor, participation and technical support were to count, he’d ace it.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.

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