Ancient Technology

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The pandemic, like any news event these days, has generated a whole new vocabulary.  I had to look up PPE on Google (Personal Protective Equipment, if you live in a cave like me).  I want to help with the effort to curb the coronavirus, but being a non-essential worker, I’m not sure what I can do.  Then my wife found an organization making PPEs.  In this case the equipment they make is face-shields.  And they were looking for, believe it or not, transparency paper.  Well, it’s really not paper, but acetate.  Although we’ve had to move several times since being pushed out of the Nashotah House nest, when I went looking for that box of transparency film that I paid for out of my own pocket in the PPPD (Pre-PowerPoint Days), I found it without too much trouble.  We still had 25 unused sheets left, and we donated them to the cause.

Nashotah House used to have one semester of required Hebrew and one semester of Greek.  Since the curriculum was highly regulated in those days, there was no opportunity for further courses in either language.  If you teach Hebrew you know that no textbook assumes just fourteen to sixteen weeks to learn it.  I quickly gave up using textbooks and had students begin translating as I walked them through it.  I had to use an overhead projector since Nashotah had no internet connection until the turn of the millennium.  It was such a small account that the cable companies didn’t want to go all the way out there to lay the physical lines then necessary for connectivity.  So I bought transparency film.  I even learned how to run it through my printer which, thankfully, wasn’t dot-matrix.

Over the years I bought quite a few boxes of the stuff.  Then the Enlightenment.  Let there be PowerPoint.  I converted all my teaching to PowerPoint slides while others made fun.  When my services were no longer required, I had to purchase a projector so that I could continue to teach on a freelance basis.  But I kept that expensive transparency film.  Now it is out there covering faces, and hopefully, unlike seminary education, saving lives.  As an erstwhile teacher of Greek and Hebrew I’ve found myself having to make some flashcards to learn the new words the crisis is giving us.  It’s a good thing, then, that when I was looking for transparency film I also found a couple packs of unopened index cards.  Sometimes antiquated pedagogy is commodious after all.

Time Isn’t Holding Us

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Ancient is much more recent than it used to be. Perhaps it has something to do with the two massive earthquakes over the last couple of years that have together sped the earth’s rotation by almost three microseconds. Perhaps. A more likely explanation is that excessive technology makes us soft. We expect new toys, new tech solutions on nearly a daily basis, and with the communications revolution, we are rarely disappointed. I wonder if we’ve forgotten how to help ourselves. This is especially evident in the lack of initiative I sense among many students. Of course, I am ancient.

When exam time rolls around, the present-day student requires a study guide. When I was a student, after dodging all the dinosaurs running around the campus, I never received a study guide for a test. If a test is coming, read, re-read, i.e., study, your notes. Maybe read a textbook? Nowadays a study guide is required for that message to be sent home. And then there’s the emails. Once the study guide is distributed (electronically, of course) the emails gush in asking what exactly I mean by this or that. Since I reiterated the point endlessly in class, accompanied by a PowerPoint slide with the answer writ large, verily, I roll my eyes and drop to my three-legged stool in dismay. Can it really be that college students require detailed answers in advance for a multiple-choice test of only 40 questions? Back in my day, a multiple-choice test was a gift that felt like sixth grade had rolled around again.

Sixth grade: what's he got in his hands?

Time, since Einstein, has been relative. And since I am an antiquity, I can perhaps be forgiven for citing Supertramp’s “The Logical Song.” As a studious young man, religious from epidermis to viscera, I was sent off to get an education. Years later, kicked out of the academy for good behavior, I see the wisdom of the lackluster 70’s band: “But at night, when all the world’s asleep, the questions run so deep for such a simple man.” The lyrics are easily found on the Internet. It is simpler than walking over to the CD rack to check manually. Back in my day, I would never have even imagined skipping an exam and then asking the professor what he was going to do about it in the next class period. Email, in this instance, is easily forgotten. I’ll get back to you once I engage the electronic lock to keep out this velociraptor (if anyone can remember back to 1993).