The pandemic, like any news event these days, has generated a whole new vocabulary.I had to look up PPE on Google (Personal Protective Equipment, if you live in a cave like me).I want to help with the effort to curb the coronavirus, but being a non-essential worker, I’m not sure what I can do.Then my wife found an organization making PPEs.In this case the equipment they make is face-shields.And they were looking for, believe it or not, transparency paper.Well, it’s really not paper, but acetate.Although we’ve had to move several times since being pushed out of the Nashotah House nest, when I went looking for that box of transparency film that I paid for out of my own pocket in the PPPD (Pre-PowerPoint Days), I found it without too much trouble.We still had 25 unused sheets left, and we donated them to the cause.
Nashotah House used to have one semester of required Hebrew and one semester of Greek.Since the curriculum was highly regulated in those days, there was no opportunity for further courses in either language.If you teach Hebrew you know that no textbook assumes just fourteen to sixteen weeks to learn it.I quickly gave up using textbooks and had students begin translating as I walked them through it.I had to use an overhead projector since Nashotah had no internet connection until the turn of the millennium.It was such a small account that the cable companies didn’t want to go all the way out there to lay the physical lines then necessary for connectivity.So I bought transparency film.I even learned how to run it through my printer which, thankfully, wasn’t dot-matrix.
Over the years I bought quite a few boxes of the stuff.Then the Enlightenment.Let there be PowerPoint.I converted all my teaching to PowerPoint slides while others made fun.When my services were no longer required, I had to purchase a projector so that I could continue to teach on a freelance basis.But I kept that expensive transparency film.Now it is out there covering faces, and hopefully, unlike seminary education, saving lives.As an erstwhile teacher of Greek and Hebrew I’ve found myself having to make some flashcards to learn the new words the crisis is giving us.It’s a good thing, then, that when I was looking for transparency film I also found a couple packs of unopened index cards.Sometimes antiquated pedagogy is commodious after all.
