on the way from here to there

So, I'm driving down I-95, heading south to the home of Disney World and SeaWorld and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and all of the other fanciful places made physical. I had traveled as far as Darien, driving and singing and letting my mind drift. Then, both of the stations I was following went into commercial breaks, car commercials - quite possible the SAME commercial. So, I shut off the radio and my mind snapped back to class this morning. We were on the topics of chemical equations and moles and molar ratios, topics I had covered for years, including back in the fall of 1995. The difference was the setting: for that particular quarter, the department experimented with the distance-learning format and I had agreed to participate in this preliminary venture.
One of the classes I taught was ten weeks of general, organic, and biological chemistry. This was a class in which the students were introduced to an incredible variety of concepts and terminology, but a class which did not require any lab performance by the students. Usually, I compensated for this lack of lab by having demonstrations during my lectures. The class was deemed perfect for this trial in which I would be simultaneously teaching on two campuses which were physically about seventy miles apart.
By the second day, I had brought a VHS cassette to be inserted in the transmission electronica. I had asked the power that be if there might be any way to tape my classes for the viewing benefit of students who might miss a lecture. The man in charge had replied that if I supplied the cassettes, they would be glad to oblige, as all the necessary apparatus was already in use for the class. And so it came to pass that almost all of my lectures that term were recorded for the first, and thus far only, time in my teaching career. I loved it!
I asked the library if they would keep the cassettes available for my students and they set up a system for the tapes to be checked-out for in-house viewing. For several years, my students enjoyed the largess of that one-time experiment. Eventually, the library returned the tapes to me and I carefully stored them away.
At the end of last fall, I again asked the library for help. I had begun teaching full-time and I thought my current students might benefit from these past lectures. Could the tapes I had be transferred from VHS to DVD so they could be uploaded online? Yes! Yes, they could! And so they were.
Then the task of getting the files online could, and did, begin. I spent part of my summer with a woman in the Information Technology field and truly could not have accomplished the task without her (Thanks, Jennifer!). She spent many hours getting the data into iTunes for my review. And then she spent more hours performing the changes I requested. Anything I asked to change, she did. Could we make the lectures into smaller, bite-sized bits of knowledge? Yes, yes, we could. Would it be possible to link the end of this lecture with the beginning of the next to make one coherent topic? Why, sure! Could I design the picture for the lecture icon? Absolutely! Might we split the material into two sections to coincide with the split of the material into two separate courses? You bet!
She and I have miles to go before we complete this journey, but I am quite proud of our accomplishments. We managed to get some key topics set up for my students this term and I have been awaiting the time to share the "old me" with my new students. So, here we are at the halfway point in this term, which only covers general chemistry, and we have finally reached the right time. After my Wednesday night lecture, one of my older students told me how helpful it was to have my lecture on iTunes. He added that he wished ALL the professors had their lectures online, as it allowed him time to fully understand the material. Nice! I had indeed noticed that most of the students seemed to follow the lecture better than on Monday and I attributed the improvement to my posting the videos online for them and alerting them to the videos with an email on Tuesday.
So, on Friday, at the end of the lecture, I recalled my conversation with that student. I had noticed the typical ennui of that class, which is composed mostly of teenagers. I asked if anyone had yet gone to the iTunes website and viewed my old lectures. One of the young women - of the 43 students in the class - smiled and nodded and said she had. She is usually attentive in class and also keeps up with my online postings.
I thought she might have wondered about my transition in the 17 years since those videos were made. If she had asked, I would have replied that there was a lot of water under that bridge. That bridge of time, standing over land which had been subject to many floods, was still recovering from the flood caused by Mama's death almost eleven years ago.