My dad was an electronic engineer, testing out new technological innovations and often seeing failure before seeing any successes. As a kid, I got to see prototypes of tech that we now think of as obsolete–CD players, Laserdiscs for movies, early HD TV beginnings (those TVs were huge). While it was exciting to see tech that worked, my dad often was tinkering with tech that didn’t work or that often failed. I wish that I had as much knowledge as he does in rebuilding computers and figuring out problems, but I tell this story only to note that I think my distrust of the reliability of tech began through these observations. I understood, at least, that tech was likely to fail and so I’m not surprised when it does. My dad taught me to have contingency plans for tech failures and so sometimes, I’m not phased when it happens because there’s a workable alternative. But there are moments when I forget that lesson, usually the hard way–for example, as a college senior, when I lost a paper on my Smith-Corona word processor (like a laptop, but not–it was “fancy” at the time) and I had to rewrite it overnight so i could hand it in by the due date.

What does this have to do with teaching? I guess it makes me realize that I expect tech failures (usually) and try to have a back up plan. My most recent example is my Workplace Comm and Writing classroom this semester. The first day of class, I tried to display something on the LCD projector and couldn’t do it. I called IT on day 1 and they “fixed it.” But 20 minutes later, the projector died and the computer shut down. I later realized that the computer was faulty, restarting about every 5 minutes, which would then cut the signal to the projector and the process would mean waiting till the computer restarted. I’ve since learned that this issue has been occurring in the classroom since the previous semester (which I picked because was the computer classroom that was available and I want students to have access to computers when theirs fails–see a pattern?). IT has been back to my class a few more times, with no solution in sight. My first response was to direct students to my class plan in Canvas, which has all of the notes, links, prompts, and activities we’re doing in class online so that they can access them there. But when there was no solution in sight for the foreseeable future, we have since moved classrooms across the hall (students can stilll use the computer classroom when they need computers during certain group activities). It isn’t perfect, but I’ve rolled with it. Hopefully, a solution will be found for that classroom soon. But in the meantime, I’ve figured out my contingency plan yet again.