It’s 3:05 am. I’m sitting in my office surrounded by 10 pounds of paper. I know this because I weighed it. I weighed it because at a certain point, you just have to know these things. It’s been dragging on my back like an albatross all day long. I can’t not know these things.
Which is ridiculous. Since it’s weight is useless to me. It’s 10 pounds of ungraded paper. And nobody measures school work in pounds. Except me. The take-away, though, is my students won’t be getting their work back tomorrow.
This isn’t actually a bad thing, though. It’s an ungraded 10 pounds because I spent the last 6 days with 30 plus students roaming the bean fields of Bunker Hill, Indiana. With about 1,500 other people. Who gathered for ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.
Our task (and by our, I mean four professors from Ball State University): create an immersive media team for Hallmark Homes, the builder on said television show. My job: build a social media team that would highlight what was going on behind the scenes. You can see what we did at Hallmark Blogs.
The experience was great with a few exceptions:
- I have 2 presentations in Austin on Friday and Saturday, training college media advisors how to use social media and how to launch a website in 90 minutes;
- I have 1 conference paper due on Sunday;
- I have 1 conference presentation a week from this Friday;
- I have 2 book chapters due
- I have to sleep….sometime.
But I can’t lie. I love my gig. I wish there were more time in the day, but there’s not so I don’t stress too much about such things. I don’t stress about 10 pounds of paper. I don’t stress about one week’s worth of grades that will be a few days late.
I’m too stoked about the job those kids did in the muddy fields of Bunker Hill, as rain knocked over tents and people scrambled for shelter. My kids just kept on going.
I’ll get my work done at some point. That’s what I do. For them, though, they are just getting started. This is the first of their memories. This is their beginning. And I get to be there for it. So I’ll sleep a little less.
That’s the gig. And it’s a good, good gig.