Getting to Kamaishi
As I deboarded my last train and waited for my bus home, I started imagining the next workshop, supposed to be held just two days after. In my mind, this was the homecoming moment, time to truly get in the game and score a winning goal that would carry momentum well after the playoff season. I started to meticulously plan, reexamine and redesign my previous blueprints for the workshop and adapt quite a few elements. I used the insight from the first workshop and how students reacted to it to guide my actions. Luckily, I had an enormous toolset of GIS features to decide what I wanted to focus on during the workshop, and after what I perceived to be a very detailed and carefully planned preparation, I felt ready to open the doors and let the students start mapping.
But my plan began to crumble even before I got to the school. Punctuality was never quite the virtue in my toolset, but I thought I was so over the days of actually being late to super important things - like my own workshops. Wrong.
The drill for going to the Kamaishi high school was straightforward - Yuki-san and I would leave at 3:30 to get there by 4:00, which is when the workshops were supposed to begin. Yet, the printer secured away in the researcher room 2, next to my desk, did not work properly and I could not print workshop material on time. Soon enough, the Casio on my left wrist read 3:37 PM as I was rushing to get my shoes on, with Yuki-san glancing from the outside, in a gray Toyota Estima, with her usual tranquility now mixed with hints of alarm and restlessness. I was being late.
An anathema in my own worldview, being tardy is absolutely taboo in Japanese culture. As I ran with my laces still undone and hurriedly embarked Toyota’s left seat, the full weight of it all began to set in. When we finally entered the classroom, I was late by some 8 minutes. Unfortunately, this was just the first domino to fall in my plan.
Unexpected Headwinds
As I began the workshop and guided the students how to use some analysis tools of the software, their faces were soon lit with confusion. After investigating, I soon discovered that students did not have access to the analysis side of ArcGIS at all, with the right sidebar on student computers being only a third as full as mine. Crafty yet sleek-looking buttons for “Summarize Within,” “Aggregate Points,” or “Join Features,” along with dozens of other essential tools, were replaced with empty white space. Within the first fifteen minutes of the workshop, about sixty percent of my plan was wiped out. In complete despair and agony, I switched ahead and instead instructed students to use a pre-ready layer I made, hoping to mitigate the worst effects of this issue and perhaps solve it later. Failure.
No matter how hard we all tried, students could not locate a layer I had uploaded online; it was just not there. It took us fifteen more minutes to finally land an activity on my planning sheet that was actually performable. The worst - it was now clear that students, indeed, only had the limited, tied-up, and neutered version of the software, with no immediate solution in sight.
The Finale
The workshop still consumed all the time I had asked for quite easily - quick improvisation, Yuki-san’s help and just about the endless amount of opportunities the software offered threw me a lifeline. Yet at the end of the workshop I was devastated. In a span of three hours, my credibility was destroyed and my meticulously devised action plan for the next few workshops was in tatters. I retreated to my chamber and soon from reality, as I started nervously journaling my afterthoughts. If you asked an AI to summarize that journal entry, it would probably spew out this - “fury, regret, and disappointment are the most common themes brought up by the author.”
As I mulled over this visible defeat over the next few days, reconnecting with You Jia, my Laidlaw Coordinator, , my coach, and my family, a vision of a plan started to emerge in my mind for the week that was to follow - a complete pivot. Yet, the way towards this shift was anything but certain…