Last First Day II

And then came Thursday. I attended three consecutive two hour meetings with very little breaks in between. The first was a workshop presented by the keynote speaker. His technology broke down. Several minutes later after two techies managed to plug in the correct cord to the correct outlet, he did a power point presentation complete with an exact handout of what we were intended to look at while he talked. I read the handout in about five minutes. I don't like power points. I think they're way over used and do little if anything to keep listeners/learners engaged. This seemed such a glaring contrast to his learning theory as presented the day before. His gig rescued itself, however, with his showing of Father Guido's Five Minute University as an introduction and an activity called "Cooky Assessment" in which small groups of us compared ideas about how to measure the goodness of a chocolate chip cooky based on appearance only. The president of the college and a really smart chemistry doc were in my small group so it was really fun and interesting. The rest of the two hour power point was average. I took a few notes and left thinking that maybe I could go on for another few terms based upon how my methods seem to line up with the latest brain research.
Next: the part time faculty luncheon and meeting. We peeled our cold pizza out of the cardboard boxes, poured ourselves some lukewarm soda, and ate while we listened to our union leaders update us about negotiation progress. One of about 15 issues has been agreed upon. And we were reminded to attend board and negotiation meetings so "they can see that we're watching them." This sort of language always makes me uneasy in that I don't feel comfortable in the "us v. them" role. I prefer being with colleagues when we talk about teaching even if power point presentations are the method of delivery.
Then I hurried off to my mid afternoon department meeting that went on til after 4:30. You would think that being with my English department fellows would calm me down. Introductions were followed by something that I've completely blanked out but it took a long time. There was a discussion about Moodle. Apparently our department blog will morph into this. I don't know what Moodle is and I don't want to. After a snack of raisins, natural almonds without salt or flavoring and the darkest chocolate in the world, we began to share our concerns about plagiarism. I don't have any. I've never had much trouble with this I think because I'm careful about assignment design. And then one of the gang got up and used the doc camera to share his reading notes from his big summer read called What Is College Writing? I will refrain from comment here. And then we talked a lot more about plagiarism with several department members detailing (and I mean detailing) some of their experiences with plagiarizing students. I could not get to the parking lot fast enough.
The only thing that sort of made me feel better was after I finished telling Pat all about my day, he responded, "Well, try doing that and then driving home from Seattle afterwards. In traffic." That made me feel a tiny bit better.
This. Is. My. Last. Term. Of. Teaching.