Life With Boys

Life with boys … why am I typing at 2 in the morning? Because I’m coughing again (still) ….

Recently, I started noticing one of my external drives clicking… not constantly, just enough that I know what is coming … and I know because I have heard that sound before, and the last time I ignored it, I lost an entire year of pictures of the boys… An entire year (I did recover a lot, but the boy’s first birthday is gone forever). You would think that would have cured me of my somewhat questionable approach to backing things up… Oh, I do back it up …. I have three external drives called teaching… but apparently I learn slowly… so this time I decided I should probably do something before the little black box containing a significant portion of my life decided it was done cooperating.

The problem is that I have been teaching since 2011 and somewhere along the way I decided I should save EVERYTHING … every class … every version of every class … PowerPoints … assignments … tutorials … student work … old versions of tutorials that had been replaced by newer tutorials but obviously could not be deleted because you just never know … and I really don’t want to just move the whole mess onto another drive and call that a backup. That is really just moving the junk drawer from one place to another … so I started going through it … which is how I found myself in the middle of social media and PR campaigns, magazines, travel guides, portfolios, websites, presentations, promotions and an absolutely ridiculous amount of Tacky Wacky Toys.

Tacky Wacky Toys was a fake toy company we created for a class … because giving students normal assignments was not enough for me … and over the course they wrote complaint letters and responses, company backgrounders, dealt with product recalls, created social media, advertisements, radio spots, brochures, news releases and new product rollouts. At some point, they weren’t really doing separate assignments anymore… they were working for Tacky Wacky Toys… and I don’t think I really appreciated all the work and effort and time until I started opening the drives again … I also found all the tutorials where everybody made basically the same thing because that was the point … learn the tool … follow the process … figure out which button did what … but those aren’t the files I keep stopping on. I stop on the weird one … the one where they took whatever we had been practicing and did something I had not told them to do. Apparently that mattered to me … probably more than getting the tutorial exactly right.

Then I found the vampires … I had almost forgotten about the vampires. The lesson was called “Vampires Coming Out of the Coffin,” and the premise was that the vampire community had decided it was finally time to introduce themselves to the world. There were about four million of them … they could not come out during the day … they did not drink human blood … they had vampire strength … money was not an issue … go. Who do you need to talk to? What are they worried about? What do they need to know? What are you going to do about the fact that your spokesperson cannot attend the 10 a.m. press conference without bursting into flames? It was silly … which was exactly why it worked. “The public” suddenly was not good enough as an audience because employers had different questions than neighbors … the government had different questions than the media … and once they figured that out with vampires we could move on to any real audience we had conveniently turned into one neat label and talk about the fact that the people inside that label were still … people … with different experiences and questions and needs and reasons for listening or not listening to us.

I came to teaching from corporate communications, so I had been thinking about audiences for years without ever calling it learner analysis or instructional design … who are we talking to … what do they already know … what do they THINK they know … what do they need from us … what are we asking them to do … and looking at all of this now I can see that I carried those questions into the classroom. I also gave students a lot of ways into things … tutorials and examples and practice and samples and another explanation when the first explanation was clearly not doing the trick … sometimes several other explanations judging by the number of files I am deleting … but I don’t think that meant I expected less of them. I think I was trying to get them through the part that was getting in the way so they could actually do the thing. I was never especially bothered by someone being bad at something while they were learning it … there is some REALLY rough student work in these folders … but I did care whether they were trying … because if you were trying and stuck, we had somewhere to go.

Which is probably why what I do now as a learning designer does not feel quite as different as it probably looks on paper. I am still asking who is on the other side of this thing … what they already know … what they need to be able to DO when they are finished … where they are likely to get lost … what might help … and what we are making them click through because somebody put it there ten years ago and nobody ever asked why. Different job … a lot of the same questions … and apparently a lot of what I now have much fancier words for I was doing because I was just trying to get the students there.

The part I really did not expect is how many of them I remember. I open a file, and suddenly I know exactly where someone sat … I remember the student who was absolutely convinced they could not do something … the one who needed me sitting beside them for a while … the one who wanted me to get out of the way … the frustration … the triumph … the occasional spectacular disaster … and the moment when someone stopped asking “is this what you want?” and started making their own decisions. I sometimes told a class that sometime during the semester I would probably be the worst professor they had ever had … I expected it … but it would get better. At some point I was going to ask them to do something they did not know how to do yet, and when you are standing right in the middle of that part it does not always feel like learning … sometimes it just feels like you can’t do it … until you can.

So what started because my hard drive was clicking has turned into me wandering around about 15 years of classrooms … deleting duplicate tutorials and 14 versions of PowerPoints and wondering why on earth I kept some of this stuff … and then opening another file and remembering a kid sitting three rows back who finally got it. I am still deleting a LOT… seriously … A LOT … because I really don’t need to move the same junk drawer to another one again.

But the vampires are staying.