Today was a bit of a different day. I woke up, got ready to go to work, and then began teaching my Final Cut Pro class — Day two. I was already about a chapter behind. Around 10:40, the power went out. This happened to have been during our classes morning break and I was showing YouTube videos to add some fun to the class. It was at this time, that the power went out.
We were just kind of waiting for things to come back on when Maggie came in to the room and asked what I was going to do. I wasn’t quite sure because none of us knew when the lights would come back on. So, I decided to send them to brunch. A couple of them laughed when I called it brunch, but it was a little early for lunch. So they were gone for an hour and 15 minutes, but when they came back at noon the power was still off.
We mulled around a bit and bantered around the idea of having a class on Saturday versus staying late for the last three classes. I am already tired, but we decided to have longer classes on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. However, the power had still not come on by 5 PM. I am a little worried about power being on in the morning. I have one student who is driving down from Logan, Utah. I am going to have to get up early in the morning and find out what is going on with the power in the building. I hope I find out with enough time to get a hold of my students if the power is still out.
This is the trouble with teaching technology. You are held hostage by the technology, and if something goes wrong you have to get very innovative to continue the class. At this point I usually pull out a dry board marker and eraser and start teaching on the white board. But teaching Final Cut Pro just does not work that way.
I don’t want you to think that I am upset or distraught over this whole thing, but this is an issue that has arisen a few times and I worry about my students. I don’t want this kind of an upsetting circumstance to interfere with their learning. It is very important that we have consistency with our environment when we are teaching our students. And I know that a power outage is minimal compared to other disasters in the world, but I’m still going to worry about my students.
