By Landon Baggett

Staff Writer

Projectors are used very commonly in most high school classrooms. They play as big of a role as the teachers themselves, displaying whatever article or powerpoint presentation is part of the lesson that day. They’ve been very useful as education devices for as long as they’ve existed, but lately, a problem with them has arisen at Hammond, one that none of the faculty can currently explain. Hammond’s projectors have all been showing the same broadcast. It’s swept across the school and debilitated the usual routines of many teachers. No, it’s not a Hammond High School broadcast, nor is it a national emergency. It’s golf. NBC golf. And we don’t know why.

Many students find it funny that golf of all things has taken over Hammond’s broadcast system. Theories have amassed among the student body of why this has been happening. “I think whoever controls the broadcasting system was watching golf,” says Jadyn McAdams, a Sophomore at Hammond. “Maybe it got stuck, or they’re watching it every morning and they don’t know that they’re broadcasting.” Madame Brower, a French teacher at Hammond has theorized about the cause of the strange broadcast. “My first theory was that a student had hacked the connection, because why not, and then my second theory was that it was construction related.” While the theories are all equally interesting, none of them have been confirmed to hold any more weight than any of the others. All of Hammond seems unaware of why golf is displaying on the projectors.

It’s affected some classes disproportionately from others. While classes like Señor Ulloa’s are more or less unaffected by the broadcast, because they’ve been able to use their HDMI input as normal, projectors like Mr. Osborne’s have been completely stuck on Golf, unable to even project what they’re getting from their HDMI inputs, the inputs that allow teacher’s laptops to connect to the projectors. Students in Mr. Osborne’s English classes have had to use their chromebooks or their phones to keep track of lessons and take proper notes, frustrating him. He’s still been able to laugh it off, though, and has gone to Ms. Dunn to ask for help on the issue. It’s been discovered that one of the HDMI ports on his projector is broken, and that the golf channel is unrelated to his problem.

“I’ll say, without naming names, that some teachers were annoyed and some just laughed it off because… it was golf.” says Madame Brower. In the end, it’s largely been inconsequential for most teachers, with only a few exceptions, but it’s still a confounding occurrence with no current explanation. Ms. Dunn offers a little insight to the issue. “Admin said that they’d fix it about a week ago, but clearly that hasn’t happened yet.” She laughs, then continues on. “Either no one’s come yet to fix it, or they straight up don’t know how to fix it, or something. I’m kind of in the dark.”

Hopefully this problem subsides soon, but it’s honestly unclear when this will be fixed. Who knows why the NBC Golf channel is the one displaying on Hammond’s broadcasting system. We should count ourselves lucky, though, because as Ms. Dunn said, laughing, “It could be many worse channels.”