Teacher Workweek -- Day 1

We started out with OSHA training on blood-born pathogens, followed by anaphylactic (spelling?) shock and use of the EpiPen at 10 this morning. Yes, there was CPR training, but since I do not coach athletics nor teach P.E. I got to forgo it. Back home early for lunch, then off to the high school ...

... where I found that my furniture had been put back in place, but all my electronics had been unplugged and the cables were just stacked in a big mess beside my computer. I spent much of the afternoon sorting out the mess and plugging things back where they belonged whilst finally putting labels on the ends of the cables so that I don't spend much time this year trying to figure out which cable is which. I also hooked in my phone and a few other teachers' phones. In other words, every classroom had the same situation that mine had: unplugged electronics with the cables just piled up in a mess. My son is spending the rest of the week at the school helping the technology coordinator fix the classroom electronics messes plus anything else technology-oriented needed. The faculty is so happy to know that he's coming because they really like him and his work.

Meantime, I met several of our new teachers and talked with them about getting together with me to learn how to use our homework web pages. I did teach one person last week, and I taught another today, so I have about 3 left to go. The biggest problem of doing this is the level of computer use competency of the individual teacher. For example, today's teacher used to work on computer databases, so I just needed to do a little bit of showing him around and giving him some advice, and he was good to go. Unfortunately, I know that not all of them will be that easy. I originally planned to get the new teachers up to speed today, but I did not count on a "hardware failure", i.e. the electronic messes in all the classrooms.

Tomorrow is a full day of the annual full faculty and staff meeting. I get to do my bit on the homework web pages and the computer lab sign-up sheets at the end of the meeting. I wonder how many people will still be attentive and functioning after all those hours?