Bye Bye AIM

Recently, AIM announced that in December of this year, they will be completely shutting down. For most of us who hit our teens around the turn of the century back in 2000, AIM was the way to communicate. Since most of us didn't have cell phones yet, we'd get home from school, log onto the computer, and sign onto AIM for hours at a time. It was a huge distractor from getting homework done, and definitely the coolest way to communicate at the time. Our buddy lists were organized in a certain fashion and the VIPS were listed somewhere up at the top. We could even set alerts for when specific "special" people signed on. And invisible mode to avoid those we didn't wish to talk to.

Most of us remember using AIM to talk for hours with our BFFs, BFs, GFs, or just to have a social life. We remember starting and ending relationships over AIM. We remember asking each other for help with homework or doing group project meetings in a chat room. We remember creating multiple screen names so we could sign on secretively and simply talk to those we wanted to and avoid the rest. But one of my most fond memories of AIM (because I have plenty of memories I'm not fond of) was using it to complete a project in the 10th grade.

In Humanities, we had a project....somewhere in our Greek/Roman unit. It was near the end of the school year and we had to showcase our knowledge of five important people from the time period (I think.) For my project, I created a yearbook and had my five important people attempt to work together to complete a year-end project in their creative arts class. I made them each a screen name on AIM and signed into all five at once and created a chatroom conversation between the five of them. Thinking back, it was a lot of fun to create, but a lot of work to play five different characters all at once. I had to make sure I was typing in the right AIM window at the right time so the right person would be saying the right dialogue. The entire conversation ended up being eight pages long.

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Arist0tle says
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Egyptian Qu33n17

I went back to my dad's house to retrieve this gem of a project, which is now over 10 years old, and revisit their chatroom conversation. I read the entire thing aloud to Jonathan, and through it, I was quite surprised at how witty I was for a 16 year old doing a high school project. (I also found a few typos and missed words, but hey, that happened in real life AIM conversations, too, right?) Amidst the mandatory "this is a school project and I need to cram in the necessary information to score points on my rubric," there were a number of moments scattered about which made me think, "Man, this was a well-executed project."

In addition to being a school project, I was able to add some hints of entertainment throughout and use real life anecdotes to keep it interesting.



I rode the bus to and from home that year, and someone really did throw a can out the window one afternoon on our way home. Our bus driver wasn't the friendliest guy either. He literally stopped the bus in the right lane of a rather busy main street, walked all the way down to lecture this kid and closed every single window on the bus. We were all about 45 minutes late arriving at our stops that afternoon.

One of the two Humanities teachers was also the person who inspired the title of my first book I self-published years ago. Ever since he mentioned it in class that day, the phrase stuck with me and I still haven't forgotten it. Depending on who actually graded my project - since we had two teachers and they usually split the work - if it was indeed him who read through this conversation, I hope he had a good grin at the reference.




I don't know how many students ever incorporated the use of AIM for a school project, but after December, nobody will ever be able to. I'm glad I thought of this 10 years ago and that it turned out well. Unfortunately, this class was definitely my lowest grade...probably in all of high school, but I got an A on the project. :)