A Look Back, A Look Ahead

Seven week ago I stared at an empty document screen and tried to analyze my entire relationship with technology. Letting moving pictures augment my proverbial word count, I eloquently summed things up thusly:

Image Source: Tenor

Since then I've been challenged to look at what I recognize as technology, assessed growing classroom use, voiced my moral hang ups about letting technological progress control our economic future, and explored how I could find support for myself and my students in the digital world.

Less than two month is simply not enough time to have changed my technological perspective. I still resent my own overreliance on my devices. If anything, being exposed to so much new information in such a short time has magnified the feeling that technology is overwhelming. My hope it that I will be able to return to the materials I've been speed reading and time and experience will have let these seeds take root and start growing new appreciation. I've experienced this before professionally- the first time someone suggests switching to using positive language while your class of 3 year olds is constantly imploding it feels like an additional demand instead of a beneficial mentality and classroom. management shift.

Educator Bailey Cavender shares similar thoughts in this post for The Educator's Room: "There was just so much being thrown at me, and not enough time to process it all. There was no shortage of strategies that I wanted to try in my own classroom, but halfway through that last day, nothing was sticking. My brain was struggling to keep up, and I felt overwhelmed." More educators share how PD can be successfully implemented to prevent feeling overwhelmed in this discussion.

Advice against teacher burnout often include platitudes like "work smarter, not harder", which I know it theoretically something technology tools are designed to help with. As much as I balked at AI lesson planning (and AI use in general), I am not currently responsible for writing out my own lesson plans. One thing that also comes up frequently as a tool for educators to maintain their own mental health is getting support from your Professional Learning Network (PLN). I've written here about PLNs, but my explorations have been more detached. I have actually put a lot of effort into my in-person PLN in the past year and made it a professional goal to establish more networking contacts in my building, but I have not yet really dug into the online options. My transitional career state makes me feel more apprehensive about pursuing internet contacts where I cannot rely on my face to face conversation and performance skills.

So I'm getting there. As a bonus, my search algorithms are all to happy to suggest edtech content (along with wedding planning tips and stories about book banning). So I'll leave you with this clip from one my favorite cyberpunk fictions, Johnny Mnemonic:

Image Source: Tenor

My Machine & Me

Sometimes when I start to feel awash in the sea of new technology, I need to ground myself by remembering that I’ve enjoyed technology my whole life. Sometimes we find ourselves already on the other side of the biggest discoveries and living instead through the refinements and tweaks that came about. No one reading this was around pre-printing press or even before the typewriter revolutionized the printed word. My lifetime has seen great leaps in digital printing, but I still grew up with the printed word everywhere. (For a diversion from the main point, you can check out the history of printers at this link or this one).

Some History- Of Sewing Machines  and the Author

But I live in one of the growing numbers of American households without a printer of my own (like some of the folks in this article). What I do have is a sewing machine.

Sewing machines were a cornerstone of the industrial revolution which you can read more about here. Connecting that history to the modern sewing machine is something you can read about here. My grandmothers both owned sewing machines and my mother used hers to make my siblings and me every year’s Halloween costumes. As a preteen I learned to operate one myself and worked together with my mother to make my senior prom outfit. I also learned hand sewing and embroidery and those were the skills I brought to college when I left home and my mother’s classic Singer machine behind.

Cut to Christmas morning a few years later and I’m unwrapping my Brother CS600i.

Image property of author

While still a beginner and budget friendly tool, this beauty was my first taste of a computerized sewing machine, with 60 programmable stitches. This has routinely proved beneficial as I tend to sew in bursts and then need to shelve the machine for a few months, so having clearly labeled, automatically set up options lets me dive back into more complicated projects right away.  There are many places you could go to get fantastic analyses of the quality of different machines like this article from Real Simple, this article from The Spruce, or this roundup from TechGearLab. But having the best machine has not been as important to me as simply having one.

Why This Tech Matters to Me

As I said above, I tend to sew in fits and starts, specifically because I’ve often used sewing to make personalized gifts for those I love. I started sewing regularly when my niblings were born and I created gifts for them to work through my guilt over being far away from them as they grew up. I also frequently craft costumes which started in my days in theater and have expanded out into making things for my partner and I as we celebrate our annual Halloween traditions, which have become a cornerstone of our memories together. It’s important for me to connect these feelings to my machine and recognize it as modern technology that makes those tasks easier and more enjoyable, giving me leeway to make mistakes and take greater chances. And sometimes I still forget about how far along my machine is in terms of modern tech incorporation just because it doesn’t have a touch screen. I used a borrowed 1960s machine about a year ago while my machine was being tuned and the differences were stark; I am so glad the project I was working on didn’t need a button hole or my timeline would have doubled. On my machine I plug in the number, put on the foot and attachments indicated and the machine guides me through the process.

Here are some of my sewing creations

All images in this slideshow are property of the author

Sewing the Future

Looking ahead, while I'm still very happy with my machine, it’s actually a device that I would consider upgrading before I’m forced to due to circumstance. This is usually not my style; I lived with my last phone having a broken camera lens for 14 months and taking photos is one of my favorite uses of my phone! But the gradual pacing of advancements with sewing machine technology makes it both exciting and comfortable to picture what I could do with a step up. I was recently able to play with a bernadette 38 whose info is here and I was absolutely thrilled by the options.  It’s a common crafter phenomenon to buy more tools than you have time for, so I’m not putting anything in my cart yet, but if the pattern scraps in my living room have anything to say about it, I’ll have my foot on a new pedal soon…

The bernadette 38
Image source: BerninaUSA