Never thought would have so much to do and such little time. We’re traveling next week to Santa Cruz and haven’t finalized all the activities yet. I believe I’m switching to panic mode between tomorrow and Wednesday if we don’t at least come up with the topics. We decided to split two days and do four shorter activities instead of the whole-day thing previously proposed. And obviously folks at the company called me all day but couldn’t reach me because I was involved in classes and meetings the whole day. Needless to say that I’m pretty beat by now — it’s only Monday! — and I’ll only be able to relax a bit after the 18th — boy, will I celebrate the end of “Special Edition”!
Last week I was “asked” to leave the teachers’ lounge and move to the directors’ room, where the Corporate Coordinator works and the directors occasionally stay when they’re at the school. Today, one of them arrived and I offered my table, she refused. The room is ok but internet connection not so much. For some reason I had no internet access throughout the whole day, having one million things to do in between classes. If that becomes a pattern, well, it’s not gonna be good for anybody…
Also, I don’t think I like being in the “east wing”, you know, while all my material, the books, the printer and everything else is in the “west wing” of the building. I gotta admit, though, that staying in the teachers’ lounge can cause a little bit of distress at times. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a teacher as well and love chatting and exchanging ideas with my peers, but sometimes it’s virtually impossible to get some work done with lots of people speaking non-stop around you. One thing that I observed being in the same room as the Corporate Coordinator is that basically she’s passing on wrong information about the programme, so I must talk to her urgently otherwise it could be bad… One thing that wasn’t bad at all was the feedback from one “immersee” we had last week, who happens to be the VP for one big company from outside Porto Alegre. The guy wants to have 20 more hours of class before his trip to Asia, which is awesome — expand services to his employees in the near future perhaps? — but we basically covered everything in 20 hours, so I’m not sure what could be done. Speaking of which, there are people at the school that are unwilling to, you know, do their job, meaning preparing classes. Do they expect me to have everything ready for them, so that they can just get the material, get in class and do their thing? Well, I don’t think so, my dear…
I saw this piece in NYT about the future of network news. Is there really anything that could be done in times of Facebook and Twitter and quality online content and livestream news — I get BBC World, Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle English, rfi English, Euronews and many more online — to save network news, not only in the US but worldwide? Let’s not forget that after Haiti’s earthquake, for many hours the population was basically providing all the images and videos seen on CNN and other channels. It’s hard to compete with 24-hour news channels when you are allowed only 22 minutes, there’s no way you can’t be superficial. Plus, there’s been a bigger contribution from regular folks — “iReporters” — in this process (Haiti’s example and most recently, Chile). If you have a camera and happen to be at the right place at the right time, do you really need a news crew to broadcast the event? A lot of job losses forecast, the job of correspondents might become something to be remembered dearly in the near future and more and more freelance reporters will be on the news and bringing the world’s stories to our TV sets/computer screens.
-- Never too many beers -- 