Ways to cope with the grind

As I've stated in an earlier blog, I work at a middle school. I found it interesting today when a teacher looked at the class and stated that "school had finally started." While we have now been in school almost a full week, many classes have only met a handful of times because of our block scheduling. This meant that up until Monday and Tuesday of this week, much of class consisted of the typical beginning of the year "housekeeping." I found it amusing that a teacher said that, and noticed something because of that statement that has to do with our class. Because of block scheduling, teachers must come up with a variety of ways to keep the class interested. During today alone I saw two videos and several PowerPoints. I bring it up just to point out that the grind does get long and we, as teachers need to be able to break up classes, and keep the attention of our students. Hopefully we don't over use these strategies, but use them in a helpful way that keeps things fresh for our students and help keep us sane.

Back to School

Working at a middle school often has teachers colliding with technology that students are more familiar with than the teachers and professionals themselves. I share an office in my school with a speech pathologist and another teacher assistant. On Tuesday, our first day back with no students, we had a technology problem. I have been fortunate enough to have grown up with computers all around me while my office mates are of a different generation. Generally, when there is a quick "fix-it" problem on the computer they come to me. Unfortunately, our printer would not print. It took the 3 of us almost twenty minutes to figure out the problem on our own. Sure we could have called tech support, but it was the first day and with only one worker in our building, it is tough to get in touch with him. That twenty minutes was used in fixing a simple technical problem that our 3 untrained minds could not figure out. That is twenty minutes that could have been spent on classroom set up, lesson plans, or any other amount of work that needed to be done that day.
The reason I bring this up is that the tech support position in the school, as well as being very busy right now, is also getting cut after the first half of the year. That means starting in January all of our problems either need to be solved on our own, or we will have to call out and wait for a person to come from another building to fix it. This poses a problem, but also showed me why classes in technology are so important to take in our education before we become teachers. As the technology grows, we need to be able to grow with it not only to utilize it properly in our classrooms, but to understand the basics in order to fix any problems that arise.