My lesson from the past week is this: Putting on a four-day conference for 1,000+ people is hard. Really, really hard.
I returned from Spokane last night, and I am completely exhausted. As in, falling-asleep-on-my-feet exhausted. I feel old.
While it required long hours of hard work, I can't exactly say that I descended into "conference hell" (except for one particular night, better left forgotten) because overall, the experience was very interesting. There were several fascinating speakers who gave their perspectives on the same thing -- improving education.
One speaker was Erin Gruwell, a high school educator who inspired her tough, gang-member students, long written off by the education system, to become high-achieving individuals. They called themselves "The Freedom Writers", and their collective work was eventually published as a book. Gruwell's story is going to be told in a movie called "The Freedom Writers," scheduled to open in theaters in January, and she is going to be played by Hilary Swank. Just a warning: If you see the movie, bring tissues. After Gruwell's talk, several members of the audience were spotted casually wiping a, uh, speck of dust of two from their eye.
Another speaker was Ian Jukes, who wigged out just about every person in the audience with his predictions of technological progress. He discussed the impact of "exponential growth," which boils down to the fact that in 15 years, computers will be a kazillion times faster and cost $1.50. (I am only slightly exaggerating.) His question was: How does this affect our approach to education?
My question is: How does this affect our interaction with one another? After hearing Jukes' presentation, I started obsessing on the inevitability of a worldwide human disconnect. It seems counterintuitive, I know -- with all the technology advancements, human beings will be increasingly connected to one another. But, it seems to me, they will become increasingly isolated from one another, too.
Again, I feel old. Is this what people thought when telephones were invented? Radio? TV? Am I just resistant to technology? Am I an old fogey? I hate cell phones, and I don't even know how to text message. I am happy as can be living sans crackberry. The fact that I even know how to blog is a modern-day miracle, as far as I'm concerned. Sheesh, I am old, old, old.
Well, now that the conference is over, I can go back to a normal existence, which means:
1) I go back to working a regular 8-to-5 day.
2) I have time and, more importantly, energy to run.
2) I have time to indulge in a nice, old-fashioned book, with words written on real paper pages, not a computer screen. So, now I am going to bed to curl up and read "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince." ("Harry Potter?," you ask. I know, I know. My love of Harry Potter was completely unexpected.) I already knows who is going to die at the end of the book, thanks to an article in The Olympian, but that's OK.
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3 comments:
Cue your 40-something friends verbally smacking you upside the head--"You want old? I'LL SHOW YOU OLD!"
badmonkey, this reminds me of the time your wife referred to "dropping the f-bomb" in front of said son, and he smiled impishly then, too. He is clever, that one.
PS I saw Nicholas Negroponte from the MIT Media Lab speak once and he was telling us all how in ten years there would be computers that would be like a piece of paper and disposable, so you'd just use them, crumple them up and throw them away. That was ten years ago. This stuff isn't quite happening as fast as all that.
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