Rocket, my 7 month old Australian Shepherd and Piper, and my dad’s dog, Piper, who really pushed me to overcome my germophobic tendencies. Recently, I allowed Rocket on my bed. I do not even recognize myself anymore.

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What’s the story of how I overcame my germophobic tendencies. I started to want a dog. I think it began was just watching Instagram feeds of these awesome. Imagine what my life would be like I have one. I can find him that I had a lot of down time and what I’m in the house alone I typically i’m on the couch being a total potato and on my phone. And cost constantly on my phone to make me feel like a slob I needed something more in my life. Probably where I start thinking about adding something to my family and a dog was a natural choice because I am by far nowhere near close to being ready to have a human child. How to serve a plants and when I got tired of plans as weren’t cousins of being a dog. Funny ways the greatest barrier to me being a dog owner was my dream about tendencies. For as long as you remember I’ve always been a very clean person and my mother I think is why I’m like this. Joey’s kept her house extremely clean there was no. Pink slime anywhere in her bathrooms and so I’ve come used to this lifestyle with everything was super clean. So my friends laugh at me when I said I want to get a dog because they knew that there was no way to handle all the germs and fur that comes with being a dog owner. So I started working on on these on my habit or getting rid of it by just hanging out with more dogs. Friends and one of my friends Ainsley she’s got two very large.. First exposure I had to do was when I visited her house. Small basement suite and she didn’t exactly keep it clean. What I mean by that is a simulator house I was until I was wholeheartedly whole body uncomfort. The entire house was just covered with hair. When I went in she saw how uncomfortable I was and she offered me to borrow some of her clothes so I wouldn’t have to get Michael Turnbull sitting on her furniture. I kept at it though and I start to play with her dog and it’s funny thing because once you start getting to know an animal you start to love. You such a grown up and from that I think you start to overcome your fears are and uncomfortableness around them. I start to pet them and when I pet them I mean when I ask after I pet them I actually was very proud of myself when I didn’t wash my hands immediately. So I went from pending one and having to wash my hands immediately to petting one and letting it go for an hour or two. I was so proud of bread about it too. From there I transition to letting a dog and not washing my hands immediately after. It was a day when her dog and I continued on my work day for entire day without washing it off and I was really proud of myself. So spring break hand and my parents here after hearing that I was going to get a dog. She call me before I did which is really annoying. So we got this little tiny dog cavachon is a white fluffy little thing so cute. We actually took it to her house my husband and I for a week because my parents or my dad’s if we just didn’t know how to raise a puppy and he freaked out and convinced us to take the puppy for the first week of his life. So we did potty training. And here’s the moment when I knew I could be a dog owner. Piper that’s what we that’s why I decided to name my dog, piper was going to potty training and she’s a very small things will become very difficult to see whether or not she is Party Up.. So we would take her outside every hour every two hours to make her learn or make her so seat potty without door. And her squat or so. Very difficult to figure out whether she can or not and it was during the rainy season 2 so it we couldn’t just use the ground figure out whether she had on her business. So one day I took her to the backyard and she didn’t Minnie Squat and to check whether or not she had peed I literally been, rub my hand on the grass, and then proceeded to bring my hand to my face and smell it. And that’s what I knew I had what it takes to be a dog owner. Fast forward a couple of months I now have my very own puppy. His name is rocket and he is 7 months old. He is an Australian shepherd and I love him so much that I actually touched him and going to bed without showering. I have also allowed him to go into my bed which is huge for me because the bed I’ve always thought as My Sanctuary where everything was as clean as possible. So I guess the big lesson here whatever it is that makes you uncomfortable whatever it is that you shy away from anything that you’re afraid, I guess love truly conquer. When I love rocket as much as I do I really don’t mind if you eat out of my hand or snuggle up to me in my face. I do think that there is one line I cannot cross. I have seen.. Food with their dog let their dog lick their ice cream cone, nana, eat the banana as a man. I think that’s what that is just too gross but who knows maybe a year to Five Years on the road maybe I would cook it to that point as well.

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Voice-to-text programs are unappealing to me because they’re not “smart”. As listeners, we are equipped with deciphering tools to help us make sense of a fumbled word. When someone fumbles a word in their speech, overall meaning remains intact because we can infer, by using the rest of the speech, what the fumbled word must have been. As seen in the transcript, I was not particularly careful in enunciating my words. The voice-to-text program was unable to select the correct word many times throughout my story, starting with the very first words, which were, “This is the”, which the program transcribed as “What’s the”. The mistranscription of the first few words in a sentence occurs numerous times, which tells me that I am really not good at initiating speech! It is actually a problem that I am aware of and I often make a point of settling my mind and making an effort to enunciate and slow down when I start speaking to someone.

Reading the transcript, I get the gist of my own story, but there are some confusing parts because numerous words were transcribed incorrectly. An oral story is more forgiving. Writing is concrete and feels authoritative because somebody took the time to put their thoughts into text. It is easier to accept that someone misspoke than it is to accept that a word in text is incorrect. Fumbling a word in speech takes a fraction of a second when compared to the amount of time it takes to put a word down on paper. Print feels more deliberate. Hearing someone say a wrong word, I would immediately think, “Oh, they must have meant ___.” Reading an incorrect word, I would question, “Is this correct? Should it be this word instead? Maybe it is this word and I am just not understanding.”

Punctuation is all over the place. I was so absorbed in speaking my story that it took a lot of effort just to focus on typing a period at the end of each of my thoughts. I knew I was making comma splices, but I just could not be bothered to pause and type punctuation. Commas, exclamation marks, question marks, and periods are communicated by tone, inflections, volume, and pauses. To type punctuation while dictating into the voice-to-text program would feel redundant and like a meaningless task. I naturally was unmotivated to do it, even though I knew that the resulting transcript would be annoying to read. I am convinced, after this exercise, that punctuation was invented much later than writing. It would certainly be weird to read a story where the inflections, pauses, and tone changes as marked by punctuation were described in full. It would be so distracting and in the way of the story, so symbols must have been invented to represent these aspects instead.

Speaking a story, the focus is on content. My attention was on making the story make sense chronologically and having the story progress logically; punctuation and grammar went straight out the window. Thoughts are thoughts and they sometimes have a mind of their own. They might occur unchronologically and illogically and so, the cognitive load, which I think of as the brain’s RAM, is dedicated to the task of organizing these thoughts. Thoughts occur rapidly, too rapidly to occur in complete sentences. Are thoughts even in words? We have an inner voice that we use to guide our emotions and problem solving, but the rest of the time, do thoughts occur divorced from words? Although I was not telling my story to a person, the idea that my speech was being recorded was enough to give me a sense of urgency because silence is awkward and uncomfortable. The time it would take for me to get all my sentences grammatically correct would result in my story being twice as long to finish. The listener would lose interest and I would lose my patience! It would sound like a Youtube video that was lagging.

These mistakes in grammar (incomplete, run-on sentences everywhere) and punctuation cannot really be called mistakes if there was no written transcript of my story. It is acceptable to speak in run-on sentences and fragments because that is how our thought patterns are in order to think and understand quickly. These mistakes only occur when stories are transcribed because there is a common set of rules that we all have agreed upon when we write. There are so many rules because the difference between oral and written communication is that when a spoken idea is unclear, the speaker can be prompted for clarification. When a sentence in writing is unclear, the author is often unavailable for questioning; they are either far away or dead.

Reflecting on my experience here, I understand why oral language preceded written language. Writing was invented, which means that it took thought to accomplish. Transitioning from thought to speech feels like a smaller step than transitioning from thought to writing. In our own development, we learn to speak first before we learn to write. There are more grammatical rules in writing than in speaking so it takes more cognitive power to write. Our own slow physical development prevents us from learning writing first as well; we simply do not have the fine motor skills to accomplish the task. I think about what it takes for any innovation to occur: constructive processes and collaborative efforts. Writing could not have been invented by one individual, rather, it must have taken multiple individuals in discussion to agree upon a common set of symbols with which to communicate. If my story of how I overcame my germophobic tendencies was scripted, it would be more concise and use less conjunctions. There would be a better rhythm and progression as I would have paid attention to sentence structure for style.

The bag I carry most frequently is my work bag, an absolute essential at a school where teachers are always on the move. Since teachers do not have their own classroom, they have to carry all their supplies from classroom to classroom. This is my bag after work with my laptop and course folders left at school.

Pictured on the right is me on Festive Sweater Day at school back in 2017. I am wearing a crewneck with a Christmas tree that is composed using the periodic table of elements — a Chemis-tree if you will — that satisfyingly includes the four most recent additions, Nh, Mc, Ts, and Og which were discovered in 2016.

Without my photo in this post, it would be very difficult to guess my profession, which is a significant part of my identify, from my bag. Nothing in here at first glance suggests that I am a chemistry teacher. It is feasible to conclude that I am a teacher, what with the planner and the whiteboard markers and the multitude of oral hygiene items, but nothing here says chemistry. The calculator suggests a profession in STEM perhaps, but that is about it. The only other object in this bag that is used in chemistry is the inconspicuous Sharpie, a tool that is used by pretty much anyone. It takes a chemist to know that the Sharpie is the tool of choice in the lab, better than the masking tape and the dreadful wax pencil when it comes to labelling our glassware.

Untold by my photo, I am a very organized and meticulous person with perfectionist tendencies. Things out of place and out of alignment irk me. My bag mirrors this as its contents say that I am someone who is always prepared and carry redundancies in case of any “worst case scenarios”. Any files I need from a computer can be retrieved from my phone. I have multiple writing instruments. I carry disinfecting wipes, mouth wash, and floss. I carry a planner that is detailed, colour coded, and filled in with only the neatest handwriting.

15 years ago, my student bag was very similar. I have always been an organized person and carried with me everything that I need. The only thing I did not carry 15 years ago is the kazoo. My personal bag on outing was very different. As an adult, my career is very integral to my identity, but as a teenager, my social group was everything. I remember carrying a mini notebook filled with sticker photos of my friends and I. I would carry this to the mall with my friends and add to it each time we visited the sticker photo booths.

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[The calculator] I had initially thought of text as any collection of symbols that carry meaning. In addition to words, I would have included in my definition pictures. After all, some languages have evolved from pictures. In this sense, I would consider a string of emojis as text, a meme as text, and math as text as well. The difference between a picture, symbol, and a word is unclear to me as all three serve the same purpose, to represent and communicate ideas. Words are made of letters, which are symbols, which are drawn like pictures. What is the difference between writing and drawing? What is the difference between reading a sentence that describes the dimensions of a square, its perimeter, and area, and reading a line of numbers that calculate the three parameters? The calculator is an instrument that allows users to input text and generates text in return. It is a tool that aids in creation, in the sense that to text is to create. If text is a linguistic construction, then surely mathematics qualifies as text. Software, transportation, machinery, are all encoded by numbers, which are the instructions. Numbers are the constructs to programs as strings are the constructs to tapestries. The calculator is also authoritative if the meaning of text in the Latin period is considered. A calculator simply cannot be wrong (oh but it can)!

[Lip balm, throat lozenges, mints, floss, mouth wash, vitamin mix, travel mug, mirror] It is shocking how many items I carry in my bag that are for the mouth and throat, but wonderfully delicious now that I have learned that to text is to create and that the word has an oral history! All these items provide self-care, to soothe and to freshen breath. I use the mirror to check if my teeth are clean after lunch. Teaching is such an oral profession, not just in the way that we profess, but also in the way that we socialize and build rapport with our students. I spend at least half a class speaking, and so if these items sustain prolonged speech, which is created or constructed, somethings given with authority, and taken as authoritative by students, then each of these items can be considered as text technologies.

[Kazoo] A hit with my students, I play the kazoo on my students’ birthdays. An instrument for the mouth, it is an oral representation of heartfelt feelings and celebration. If to text is to create, I can think of no stronger activity to embody creation than music. There is something oddly authoritative about music as well, in the way that it commands attention and respect. Students may not listen quietly to a lesson, but they listen to the kazoo in utter silence. This is perhaps my favourite text technology in my bag. It represents my playful nature, my sense of humour, and my overall demeanor in my classroom. An archeologist who finds my kazoo might at least think that the owner of this bag was quirky.

[Whiteboard markers, pencil, pen, Surface Pro stylus, Sharpie, pencil case full of more of these things] So much of teaching and learning are reading and writing. Tools to do this with are the staple text technologies in a classroom. If I had to choose just one tool to bring into a classroom to learn or teach with, I would probably choose a computer, but a writing instrument would be a very close second! We think about learning not just as hearing ideas, but as constructing ideas. Since our mental capacity is limited such that we can only hold so many ideas in our imagination at once before things start slipping away, and we would like to free up some of our “mental RAM” to do complex mental processes, we have to write things down to lessen our cognitive load. The whiteboard markers and pencil suggest that I engage in collaborative, constructivist activities and the Surface Pro stylus suggests that I am proficient with computers.

[Sanitary pads] I thought these items would no way have anything to do with text technologies, but the Greek roots of text surround childbirth, which is where the idea that to text is to create comes from. Sanitary pads might be the antithesis then, in that they mark a failure to bring forth a child. What do we call an anti text technology?

[Eyeglass cloth] I imagine that in the far future, no one will be wearing glasses anymore as corrective eye surgery become more mainstream and affordable. This item would be telling of the period that I live in to any archeologist that finds it. Though not a text technology itself, eyeglasses are essential to reading text.

[Facial oil absorbing sheets, hand cream, wallet]  These items, other than containing text on their packaging or contents, have little to do with text technologies.

[iPhone] And here we arrive at the very modern definition of to text. I must send countless text messages each month! Even in the modern definition, texting is still a very creative process as we now not only send words, but gifs, memes, and cryptic emojis. Smartphones are used for photography and videography too, making it an artistic tool as well. Anyone with an iPhone can be assumed to be literate as all the menus and navigation are text based. A cruise through the browser history might also reveal a person’s level of media literacy. Does the person browse credible websites or do they frequent websites pushing conspiracies and anti-scientific views? What privacy settings have they chosen to use on their device? I currently have both Whatsapp and Signal installed. What does this say about me?