My wife and I in Krka National Park in Croatia.
The contents of my green MEC backpack.
The bag that I chose for this exercise is my green MEC backpack that I take with me to work daily, out on bike rides (technically it’s a cycling backpack), hiking up mountains, and while travelling. As it gets used for so many different purposes, its contents can vary greatly from one outing to the next. Thanks to the current state of affairs (the fact that school is in full swing and travel is highly discouraged), the contents of this bag have been pretty consistent for months, with minor changes here or there. Presently it includes the following items (pictured above): a work-issued Lenovo tablet PC with mouse and charger, my favourite graph paper notepad, tests to be marked, Jaybird Bluetooth headphones, a graphing calculator, a scientific calculator, hand cream, hand sanitizer, two dead batteries, a whiteboard marker, a pencil, my favourite black pen, wet wipes, white out, binder clips, paper clips, a sandwich bag with unmarked gel capsules (which I believe are Ibuprofen), a University of Waterloo clipboard, a quarter, a 100 Hungarian Forints coin, a black Klean Kanteen water bottle, and University of British Columbia stainless steel vacuum travel mug.
The majority of these items are the things that I need to transport back and forth with me from work because they are used both in the classroom and nightly as I work away both at the kitchen table. My tablet PC is the most important piece that I take with me every day. I wish that I could leave it at work, but between grad school and the additional demands of teaching in a hybrid model, there have only been a handful of schooldays this year where I haven’t had to put in extra time working at home. My Bluetooth headphones are the second-most important in terms of daily need, as they act as my microphone for recording remote lessons. Rounding out the necessities, my water bottle is crucial in a time where school water fountains are currently shut off due to Covid concerns. If I were to miss transporting any of those three things with me on a daily basis (along with my charger, of course), it would greatly impact my ability to do work and likely cause me an incredible amount of stress. The other items, as important as they are, are either easily replaceable or don’t have the same sort of consequences if not immediately available to me.
In terms of these items being “texts” that speak to who I am, the contents emphasize how much my life is currently consumed by work and grad school, with a hint or two about what I do with my freedom (like the Forints I collected in Budapest). Also, I don’t consider anything within my bag to be private or at odds with the image I outwardly project. I am a math teacher, and I carry calculators and marking, which sounds like a pretty likely combination.
As far as text technologies go, I communicate a lot with my students using my computer – through both e-mail and Google Classroom private messages – as well as by creating and displaying lessons. I consider myself to have a moderately high level of computer literacy which helps me to produce video content using screen-capture programs and annotation software. On a more analog level, I also place a high emphasis on providing handwritten feedback to my students, which is evidenced in the partially marked stacks of tests currently in my bag. Also speaking volumes about how I communicate is the near-empty pad of graph paper. I discovered this specific graph paper back in my days tutoring in Halifax and it has been a game-changer for me. I can be a very technical person, and I care a lot about the clarity of the information that I provide to my students, which is why I use graph paper whenever I can (and I encourage my students to do the same).
Were you to look at this bag (or its predecessor) 15+ years ago, the major difference would have been the laptop – twice as thick and without the same ability to annotate digital texts. Less obvious would have been the absence of the foreign currency, which eludes to the stories I hold of travelling Europe with my Canadian-Croatian wife and the world she has opened up for me.
Admittedly, there are many things that are often found in this bag that I wish had made their way in for today. I wish the majority of text technologies currently present – the textbook, tablet, graph paper and writing utensils – were removed and replaced with a towel and swim trunks (as in August 2019 when summers were spent swimming in the Adriatic) or a camel pack and sandwiches meant for consumption at the top of Mount Seymour. Hopefully soon enough I’ll be able to switch out the contents for another adventure, where the texts include maps of places I’ve never been, and the technology doesn’t readily connect me to my work e-mail.