Edel went to a college in Pennsylvania and Melinda to one in New York. Both have undergraduate degrees in elementary education, yet they both recalled how lost they felt when they first stood in front of a classroom. They hadn’t done nearly enough student teaching, they felt, and, in any case, the student teaching they had done hadn’t prepared them to deal with issues, as Edel put it, “like poverty, drugs, crime, and hunger” that she was seeing on a daily basis.
In desperation, Edel sent a note to one of her college professors asking for help. (He gave her a few pointers.) Melinda recalls thinking that even the most basic elements of her job — classroom management, organization, lesson planning — were things she had to figure out on her own, after she had begun teaching. When I asked them what they had learned in college, they shouted in unison: theory! (Denise went on to get a master’s degree in education, which she laughingly described as “not exactly hands-on.”)
Three Sisters (Not Chekhov's) by Joe Nocera | NY Times | Published: September 27, 2013
Speaking of classroom management, organization, and lesson planning, I am trying to figure out how to make my computer act like Google.
Katie Beals told me, a while back, that computers were not designed with writers in mind, and that is
soooooo true. I have dozens of copies of exercises, lessons, class readings, handouts, fables, folktales, fairy tales, myths, etc. scattered all over my hard drive, and I can't tell which ones it's safe to throw out because I can't tell which copies really are identical copies and which are different.
Of late, I have taken to dating every single thing I write, create, or duplicate (making duplicates is the real problem)....but that doesn't work, either, because duplication produces multiple copies with the
same date in the filename, which doesn't help.
Word does tell me, in the Finder window, which of several documents I opened most recently, BUT if I forget to read the date and open the document without thinking -- which I inevitably do--the history is gone.
I need my computer to do its own personal Google search.
I need it to go find every single copy of a document AND every single near-copy of a document (and I'd like it to find things it thinks may be related to the documents I'm looking for).
Then I need my computer (this part is nothing like Google) to tell me which copies are exactly the same, which ones are not the same, what exactly is different among the four or five copies of the same file, and when I last revised what.
I've tried to develop a habit of including a "Last Revised" notation inside every document I create, but I create hundreds and hundreds of
tiny documents -- exercises and lessons and brief passages for my class -- and at any one time I'm juggling so many of them that I have not become a person who automatically and without having to think about it includes a "Last Revised" line in every document.
I will keep trying, but why should I have to become that person, anyway?
Word could easily enter a "Last Revised" line in every document I create,
so why doesn't it?
As far as I can tell, Word was created for students, not teachers.
Students and student
types.
Word was created for people who were going to write something ONCE, put it out there, then never look at it again.
Word was not created for people who write something once, then revise it after class, then re-revise it one year later, then re-re-revise it after
that class, then re-re-re-revise it one year after that, etc.
It's a problem.
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