Catching On

One of my favorite things about teaching is watching my students catch on to something. These are honors kids in a digital time, so everyone has read the SparkNotes on Animal Farm and can recite on cue that it’s an allegory for communism published in 1945. But they realize on their own, in the midst of an entirely different inclass discussion that their friend is a bit like Horse.

The benefits and tenure of a full-time job in K12 would be quite nice, but I so love that I get to be part of the discussions connecting literature to their lives.

Just in case you ALSO like watching people catch on, here are some things I’ve recently discovered:

I should have arrived at E3 earlier. I didn’t realize just how much went on before the official show opened, and that I could actually go to a lot of those events because I’m press.

I should have planned a proper showfloor route, and it should have been on the location of demo booths and not my own favorite games. Because, oddly enough, the sprawling display booths were not arranged in order of how much I like the game, and it’s a long walk from Sims3 Ambitions over to Harvest Moon.

I need an iPhone. The people who were tweeting up and looking up directions as they walked around had a huge advantage over those of us who had to haul our laptops back to the free wifi in the pressroom. But hey, did I mention that I’m press and I can hang out in the pressroom?

I found an affordable place to stay at the Cecil Hotel, which is a mix of old Hollywood glamour and the Happiness Hotel from the Great Muppet Caper. The lobby has recessed statues and marble columns, but the dorm-room doors on the rooms have been painted and thickly repainted into heavy smoothness, and the guests who weren’t E3 attendees were long-term residents. It’s clean and close, which is what I was looking for, and the Roman decor is just an extra bonus.

Unfortunately, I made the assumption that a hotel offering wifi meant there would be wifi in the rooms. Not so. The wifi is actually available only in a marble-floored lobby.  Late at night, the tables and chairs, and corners, and even the curving marble stairs fill with games bloggers posting news and filing their stories. We exchange deadline nods or greetings and cards over our respective laptops and respective WordPress dashboards, and I think, for all my mistakes on this trip, I’ve found my people.