Old News

I have spent several hours going through one box of many resources accumulated over a lifetime of teaching and administration. One box, taken from a bedroom and a shedful of boxes. This particular box was a collection of carefully collected, collated, organized and filed newspaper articles, commentaries, editorials and so on.  Each piece had been careully cut and trimmed, pasted onto a piece of paper as a background and labelled with date and the name of the publication to produce a photocopiable master. Some were accompanied by ditto masters, some by OHP transparencies. Thousands of hours of work, all on its way to the recycling bin.

I did try to pass them on. Afcter all, who would not want 50 pieces related to Macbeth - discussions, relations to (then) curent events or leaders, reviews of performances and interpretations? Each could illuminate a topic under discussion, prompt an analysis or exploration, support or counter an argument, make one's brain bigger. Well, apparently no-one. I asked around, sent messages to former colleagues and proteges, posted in professional groups ... not a peep.

Teachers today do not use "handouts" or discussion prompts or supplementary materials. They use "the cloud" or resource-sharing platforms and students access these files on their devices. They have no need for the physical master-copy.

A few minutes ago, I did an online search on a random five of these resources, each on a differnt topic and each I remember to have been both useful and effective as a teaching and learning aid. Not one came up in the search, not even when I added in the publication names and dates.  All the thought and effort and writing-craft by the original "content producers" has been silenced and effectively lost. 

I understand that the "new" in news means ephemeral, and yet it is a real shame. Many of my students went on to the world's best universities, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge among them, and I like to think that their time with me played some role in this and that my use of the materials mentioned above figured in that. 

Back to the boxes. The next one contains student mini-posters, again all curated and sorted and labelled, and again representing thousands of hours of my and my students' work. This will take longer as with many I remember (or reminisce over) names and faces and classes and schools. Still, as Linda says to Willy, "Life is a casting off." It's just a shame.

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