I Woke Up and Smelled the Burning Coffee

It is true. Our experience with coffee can be indicative of our professional teaching lives.Getting out of bed can be a bit anticlimactic for me these days. There is usually the wonderful smell of brewed coffee floating throughout the house, beckoning me to caffeinate my brain, get dressed and don a can-do attitude to face the day. I’m a bit of a purist, though, when it comes to coffee. Give me Starbucks, but on my terms. I scour the ads for the most reasonable by-the-pound price and definitely groove the brew-it-whenever-you-want freedom that this affords. But, over the last year or so, all that is good and right in my coffee world has changed. As I age, I seem to cling to every second of remaining rest in the morning while my husband seems to be doing the exact opposite. He is getting up at 4:00 on some mornings, sometimes earlier. I used to love our unspoken rule of the last twenty years - the first up is the first to fix the coffee. But no more. Coffee that has been brewed and sitting in a pot for 2+ hours is what I call “burnt” coffee. At first it will smell like okay coffee, but as you take your initial sips, you instantly realize it is not. It’s been reducing, thickening, concentrating into pourable nastiness. As of late, I have dumped many a cup right down the drain and made a new, fresh batch just to rectify the emotionally disturbing moment. I’m getting better, though. I am starting to smell when coffee has “turned” abnormal. There is an smell, I’ve decided, of even the most slightly “burnt” coffee.I’ve had an interesting parallel in my professional life as a computer science teacher. I’ve had a website for about nine years now, which is a long time in our digital world. Years ago I was fascinated and drawn to the process behind making web pages. Learning html, Javascript, CSS and how to make web graphics made the left and right sides of my brain hum in happiness! I immediately wanted to share what I was learning with my students and so established a web design class where I could also use my web page to support their learning. Enrollment those first few years was pretty good. But something happened these last few years. The Web 1.0 became Web 2.0, and the strangest thing is I sensed it was happening, slowly like burnt coffee, but really didn’t lift my head from my own learning to see it happen. A few years back, I had convinced myself that I needed to immerse myself in web design concepts/software , i.e. navigation/usability issues, optimization, how to better make use of Photoshop, GoLive, Flash, Html, CSS and the likes. And that’s where I’ve been, immersed and not looking around much at what’s been going on. I thought, if I just learn enough about this stuff, kids and staff will be into it before no time. Never mind that it is puzzle-like sometimes, challenging, time-consuming, and yet rewarding. While I was slaving away to build a viable curriculum in this area (which I quickly found out changes every time you breathe in), the world solved the problem. People want to read and write to the web to express themselves or an idea, but they don’t want the steep learning curve I have offered these last few years. MySpace figured that one out quickly, as did all blogging platforms. Make it easy and they will come. So here I am, refocusing, redirecting it is where I want to go and where I should be taking my students as a high school computer science teacher. Reading The World is Flat by Friedman has jolted me into a new reality that I must responsibly get students ready for the 21st century in the best way possible. Saying that is the easy part. Doing it — another thing. Teaching how to make a “car” is important - if this is the engineering field you want to go into. But most of use won’t. We’ll be users/drivers instead, and knowing ”how to drive” will be the most important skill. Then you can go places. I guess the same could be said of computer skills. I’m ready to let students learn to use user-friendly Internet tools (pre-made web-based applications) to start “driving” - blogging, podcasting, vlogging, and more. That’s what it’s about, I’m thinking. So, thus this blog. My learning about teaching, technology and computer skills is so much like this, always evolving, changing and growing. I have determined that if I remain motionless in my own professional growth, or overly concentrated in one aspect of it, I’ve become much like a slowing burning pot of coffee, undrinkable and not what I should offer others when I know there is fresh, good stuff out there to be had.