Time to hide all the crowbars

On the first day of class, my film students watched two brief video clips--the copier-smashing scene from Office Space and the driving-the-car-into-the-lake scene from The Office--and then wrote about how the clips portray the relationship between people and machines. I was surprised by how many of my students had never seen Office Space and by how much sheer joy I can still get out of watching those guys whaling away at a copier with a crowbar.

I've returned to that scene in my mind many times in the past week: When I stayed in my office hours after my final class on Friday to try to repair a tech problem, and when I returned to my office Saturday morning and again Sunday morning to continue wrestling with the issue, and when I learned that I'll have to accommodate the needs of another distanced learner who will be attending every class via Zoom, and then this morning when I learned that Zoom is suddenly not working at all, so that my Comedy class's first foray into Zoom teaching will have to be postponed.

But the class itself is not postponed: Zoom is down but Moodle is available, so I emailed my Comedy students to tell them I'd post an online discussion activity on Moodle to take the place of today's class. And so I sit here in my office once again scrambling to rescue what remains of today's lesson plans and trying not to cry. (Again. Tears have appeared nearly every day since classes started, mostly tears of exhaustion after I finally get home, which I'm doing a little later every day with not an ounce of energy left for whatever needs to be done at home.)

I'm not a violent person but if I routinely kept a crowbar in my office, you know what I'd be doing right now, right? 

I keep hearing that old-fogey faculty members need to get with the program and adapt to the demands of technology, and I'm trying! But sometimes the technology doesn't work, and sometimes the labels on the remote-control for the classroom projector are too small for my old eyes to read, and sometimes my students submit documents in a form my computer can't read, so I have to be nimble, flexible, agile, and resilient.

But one of these days I'm getting my hands on a crowbar, and when that day comes--look out!