The Mysterious Case of My Video Students and Their Magically Malfunctioning External Hard Drives

The Mysterious Case of My Video Students and Their Magically Malfunctioning External Hard Drives

The best true story I have from teaching this week was discussing with my video students about the grave importance of backing up their work on multiple hard drives. “Every semester, one of my students ALWAYS has their external hard drive stop working on them. Usually and “mysteriously”, it is during finals week when you are most stressed out. I want you to know that one of you in this class will have their hard drive stop working. So PLEASE backup your work! Be responsible. I don’t like seeing my students in tears from losing their work. It happens EVERY semester.” Not more than 40 minutes later, one of my students calls me over to nervously inform me that her external hard drive has stopped working. So I escorted her downstairs for IT to analyze the drive, but there was nothing they could do. And of course, the student didn’t backup her files, which included her first video project. Yet I did manage to recover her first video project on the instructor computer since we didn’t have enough time to go through all the class’s video projects and had the students who didn’t go to copy over their video files to my computer. Luckily for her, her first project was one of the projects we didn’t see and it was still on my computer. She deeply thanked me.

For my second video class the following morning, I told them the same story that one of them would have their external hard drive stop working on them at some point during the semester. This time, only 5 minutes later a student called me over because her hard drive wasn’t working. And I had just told the class about the previous student’s experiences just yesterday. Okay, now this is getting really eerie and weird. Was I turning into a psychic or have I just been teaching for too many years?!?

So during my third video class later in the day, I recounted to them my story about how one of them would have their external hard drive fail on them and how two others students in my other two video classes had their external hard drives prolifically fail on them immediately after telling them that they would. So what was this class’s smart and intelligent response to me, their wise professor? “STOP TELLING US THIS STORY!!!! STTOOOPPPPPPP!!!”

Needless to say, the moral of this story is to PLEASE BACKUP YOUR WORK. The End. (That reminds me, I better backup my work that right now… or else.)