As You Like It: Stars in My Eyes Pt. 2

Click here for Part 1

The technology piece of our presentation was driving me and my co-trainer Merilee slightly mad. You remember me, the one who owns a cell phone that only — gasp — makes phone calls. Ironically, when I had originally filled out my application to be a STAR trainer, I had blithely checked off knowledgeable in PowerPoint, computers, and sending a chimp into space, assuming that I would figure it all out when the time came. Well the time was here.

The piece of technology that was making us nuts was a polling device. It allows you to project multiple choice questions onto a screen where your participants can choose their answers by pushing buttons on little clickers. After everyone has clicked in, you push a button on your computer and voila! It calculates your audience’s answers and displays the results on the screen.

You can gauge what percentage of people already have some knowledge of what you’re about to teach, or how many participants understood what you’ve just taught, thereby enabling you to tailor the presentation to their needs. It’s also used in college classrooms and has been called “wicked cool” by some students that I talked to. And like all technology, it is — when it works. When it doesn’t work it just looks kind of sad, and you look like an inept loser who can’t even work your own computer.

Of course, every new piece of hardware or software has to be installed and — here’s the kicker — by someone who really knows what they’re doing. And that usually isn’t me. Sure, they try to convince you that all you need to do is to follow their directions, but have you ever tried it? You start out full of confidence that, yes, you’re an intelligent human being and can install this whizzygig. As the philosopher DesCartes once said, “I think, therefore I can install!” or something like that.

You begin by following normal directions, like “choose from the menu,” or “click on save,” but then somehow you cross into techno Neverland where you see instructions like: frapping the zort three times will give you the choice of wicking the tricon raptor or freezing the liverwurst. At which point I usually put my head down on my keyboard and scream, “Shatz!!!!” and magically, my husband, king of all things computer in the Schottenfeld household, appears to slay the beast. That is also why we get desperate phone calls from Arizona and Cambridge from certain daughters who have unfortunately inherited their mother’s computer prowess.

That day there were about eight of us with a whole wheelbarrow full of degrees (unfortunately none of which were in Computerese) who gathered at the Department of Education office in Malden to enable one polling device. The DOE people had erroneously assumed that their tech people had already installed the software, but it turns out that all they did was plug various things into other things.

“Well, how hard could this be?” we asked each other heartily, knowing full well that we were all on the polling Titanic. My first question was, “Where is the manual?” But it turned out that there was no manual, just a laminated keychain thingie of “Quickie Instructions” that promised to get us up and running in no time. (Sometimes I wonder if the universe was created by a set of Quickie Instructions.) Sure enough, the instructions were a mixture of English and techtrek, but we were determined to frap the zort until we were victorious.

We gazed at the computer and the huge bag of clickers in front of us. Then we opened up the PowerPoint presentation, said a quick ecumenical prayer, and began hopefully clicking — and clicking — and clicking. We read the instructions on the key ring, performed them as instructed, clicked, read again, changed a few settings, and clicked. We went on in this fashion until suddenly I had a scary thought: “What if each of these clickers needed to be programmed?”

Finally, we found the most important piece of information of all — the Help phone number. We spent the next two hours speaking to a very patient guy somewhere in the Midwest, and lo and behold, four hours later it still didn’t work. Merilee and I were hyperventilating when we left. We had one week until our training and we had no idea if this would work. The DOE ladies, God bless them, spent the next week alternately conferring with the help guy and programming each and every clicker, and, unbelievably, one hour before our first training the polling did work.

After all the months of preparation and worry, the training itself seemed almost anticlimactic. It all went amazingly well. After that first marathon day, when we didn’t get home until 9 that night, knowing that we had to be there again at 8 the next morning, I felt that I could do anything in the world. And more importantly, I felt that it was all worth it.

The teachers and directors had been receptive about the new reading instruction package and excited about trying it out at their schools. And that’s what mattered — that in some way I might have had a hand in helping a few students learn to read a bit more easily and to get on with their lives. Even if it meant worrying myself sick, losing sleep, and perhaps frapping a zort.

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Posted by Joan Florek Schottenfeld on Feb 16 2011. Filed under As You Like It, Featured Content, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.