How this all started
That day’s lecture: Short news stories. I checked off my class prep list: a class roll, a slide show updated for a new semester, a group activity already shared via Google, and my example stories pulled up for quicker screen sharing in Zoom. I was ready. At least until I realized all my example stories were from 2012. For me, 2012 seems like yesterday, but I knew my students would be trying figure out if they were still in elementary school when I last updated my lecture. These were good examples and it had taken me several hours to collect them initially, so I hadn’t updated them. Why waste time searching for things I already had when I could spend that time on grading or writing test questions or looking for short YouTube videos I could share in class? Plus I had 30 minutes before class, not hours. And I knew any new examples I might find would read exactly like these examples from 2012 so again why bother? Because I am obsessive like that. And because I clearly re...