First Day, New School, Olympic Dreams

So, last night I was officially assigned to teach a class at Salt Lake Community College. This is on top of 7 courses I will be teaching at Utah Valley University. So, the end of the email from the coordinator who hired me said, "So, will you be able to make it tomorrow?" TOMORROW!? The first day was apparently today, but I thought it was next week. Dear me. So I stayed up late, through something together and almost died when my alarm sounded at 6 a.m.

I really do love the first day of school. I always have -- as a student and a teacher. I like change. It's fun and different. Maybe I like drama too. Not sure. Anyway, I had to stop and ask several people for directions before I found the office and my classroom. But it all worked out in the end.

As a class I had my students do a giant brainstorm of all the media involved in the Olympics. We talked a lot about mainstream media messages NBC commentary and newspaper coverage. Then I had them get on computers and search for underground and less noticeable media messages that have been made about the games.

This seemed fairly obvious to me. Look up videos on You Tube posted by athletes and spectators. Search Google blogs for peoples accounts of attending or watching the Olympics. Look for small Web sites, fan sites, athlete sites la, la, la. Instead I look up and every single students is staring blankly at the same list of Google hits from their obvious search of "Olympics." So I said, "Someone go check for interesting clips on You Tube and someone else go search Google blogs." Next time I look up, 8 of the computers are playing the same Chinese cartoon, which was obviously the first video that came up on their search.

I mocked them, and we had a good time about it. But, I am sort of shocked that even with the computer generation, they don't always know what to do with the Internet. They blog, but they don't know how to search a blog. They know how to find funny videos, but they can't search You Tube to learn something. Nothing against them at all because it was early, and they were really fun in class. But it is sort of a sad cultural commentary.
Also to their credit, I did the exercise myself later today and much enjoyed the junk they found.