Last month I turned fifty, and I am not ashamed of that. I am happy that I am where I am, and I just remind myself that the Bible says my gray hairs are a crown of wisdom --although my gray doesn’t look like a crown, it looks more like a skunk stripe down the middle of my head. But, my age can be a hindrance at times. For example. . . .
This past summer I attended Teachers Week at Faith Builders, which is a wonderful way to get motivated and inspired, and to get lots of new ideas from other teachers as well. When I filled out my preregistration form, one of the classes that I marked to attend was “Intermediate Excel.”
“Oh, how wonderful,” I thought, “I can learn how to help those intermediate middle-school aged children want to excel more. You know, the elementary grades are always pretty well motivated, and the high school students are more mature, but those intermediate students, well, I really want to help them excel.”
Then I got some more information closer to the date of the event and read that I was supposed to have a laptop computer for the “Intermediate Excel” class. “Oh, wow,” I thought this time. “We are going to help these intermediate students learn how to excel by doing some computer stuff. Now that should really help them want to excel.”
So I went to Goodwill Computers and bought a used Mac lap top.
I lugged that heavy thing (it is an older Mac) through the airport and security checks and all over the place. It was a pain.
Then at the orientation session, they announced something about everyone who signed up for the Intermediate Excel class needing to have Windows installed on their laptop, and it was that then I realized my misunderstanding. Silly me, this wasn’t a class to help intermediate students excel, this was a class for Excel -- the computer program or application or whatever you call it.
This is why people like me have Macs. I had to laugh at myself, which is a very good thing to do when you are a teacher and you mess up and do something stupid like this.