It's official..

I turned my keys to the School today. I've returned to being a mere citizen, a mortal, "just a parent"......

I'm no longer a teacher at the School.

I've griped about this over the last year, both in writing and mostly verbally to the lucky few who have had the "pleasure". But all in all, it was a very, very good time. Some things that I consider to be "good things":

1. I got the chance to get to know 18 high school students. A couple of them I knew already because they were friends of the girls, I got to know them better. A couple more I knew of and got to know much better. And quite a few I had never even met, and, well you get this point. The opportunity to get to know these kids was one of the biggest blessings in my life.


2. A number of the students really went from nothing to something, in both general computer literacy and specific web-design skills. I'm not bold enough to think that any of them are now competent to take on a "real" web design gig, but some are actually pretty close, at least HTML and CSS. It was really fun to see the light bulbs come on after a while and see kids who were terrified of this stuff really get it.


3. I think I demonstrated to most of them that I was a complete knucklehead. While that might sound a bit deranged as a positive, I specifically wanted to show that I was not a teacher. I was a professional software developer and as such it was important that students see that the things that are "important" to some teachers were completely meaningless in the "real" world. When I did test, it was always open notes, open book, open Google. That's how life is, at least my job life. And everybody got an "A"...I felt that everyone showed up to class, participated and did a good job. It was an elective and I focussed on learning and not examination and memorization.


4. It was very gratifying to me as the year was concluding when a number of students asked if I was teaching again next year. I knew at the time that I wasn't going to, both because I didn't want to and that the school was changing things and cutting back...but I kept my answer very vague and appropriate. The important fact was that a couple of these students really wanted to continue on and learn more. It was even more satisfying when a bunch of students who weren't in my class, approached me to find out if I would be teaching because they were genuinely excited to have a chance to be in my class. Needless to say, all were dissappointed when I told them I wasn't and they were going to have to get used to getting their technology education from the existing staff. I'm sure there was a touch of the "it's an easy A"... but I'm confident that a lot of it was that I tried to focus on the important stuff: relationships, application of what was learned and thinking and not memorizing and rote reproduction of trivial examples.

Of course, what would it be if I didn't have a couple of rants to go along with this?

1. When I originally signed up for the gig, it was presented as a more advanced class, with students at some level of pre-existing knowledge. What I ended up with was a bunch of kids who, for the most part, were basically clueless in even the fundamentals of Windows...things like saving and naming files.


2. This challenge was amplified by the fact that there were 18 students in the class, more than twice as many as I signed up for.


3. And to make this bad situation worse, my "classroom" was actually the library, where the students were scattered all through the room preventing any chance of a normal presentation layout and it made it really difficult to teach to this large group.


4. While understandable, the School does not allow the students to log onto their machines as administrator and a surprising number of the tools I tried to use required it. My CSS editor of choice, TopStyle was a big offender, as was AlleyCode (both big favorites of mine!) The Express version of Visual Studio, while free, has the same problem. I finally got Aptana up and working, but it was a bit of a hack. I refused to resort to a visual, drag and drop type of web tool, which is good, since there don't seem to be any that are free.


5. On the subject of tools, the school had no budget for the purchase of anything software related, so everything I had to use needed to be free. At first, I thought that using an cheap editor like Notepad2 would work, but reality set in and a richer IDE like Aptana was really the way to go. I only wish Aptana's CSS editor was stronger. A side story/memory: the first day of class was held in the computer lab upstairs, because at that time, they didn't have any computers for this class to use. They basically scheduled 18 kids and set me up as a teacher to teach web design without any computers! By God's provision, a generous company donated some old laptops at the last minute and that's what we used.


6. Flash drives, while really cool, are actually a pain in the rear. I spent as much time during the first semester working through flash drive issues as I did teaching. Things improved radically when I set up a central lab server and created a share for each kid on it. Being the School, this machine was one of mine, using my copy of W2K Server and I had to do all the work...but it made my life so much easier. And it got rid of one of the many machines in my basement that Kristie has been pleading with me to do something with.


7. I was "team teaching" with a seasoned professional when the year started. The School offered 3 Web Design classes last year and I only taught one of them. The remaining 2 were taught by a well-intentioned, but completely un-knowledgeable teacher. She's a nice lady and all, but she didn't know a thing about anything that she was supposed to be teaching. So the "plan" was that I would teach the first class, where she would be as much a student as anything. Then she would basically repeat the lesson two more times and we'd be done. Not a great plan, but I thought this was how things worked, remember, I'm newbie here. A few problems immediately sprung up. One, this individual didn't really want to "learn"... she's the type of person that wants to be the authority figure but can't be bothered with actually learning the stuff. So when she wasn't interrupting me and taking over, she would sneak off to do other work. She also couldn't resist in providing me all sorts of valuable feed-back. Information that she thought would help me be a better "teacher". Like which kids she felt were trouble (even though she was making a quick judgement...) How I needed to demand discipline. How I needed to assign homework and have all sorts of quizzes. How it would be "better" if I put together a list of terms for the kids to memorize. How I needed to lay off on the humor because some of the kids weren't "getting it". Enough said. The last & biggest problemo was that about 4 weeks into the year, she needed to go have surgery and would be out for the rest of the semester. She knew this up front before the year started. This whole "teach me so I can repeat it" scheme lasted for 4 weeks. After that, she scraped up subs and unsuspecting foils to fill in for her for the remainder of the semester, and these people knew about as much as she did, and were not available to come to my class. Which meant that the other 2 classes (which were doomed since she was the teacher any way) learned absolutely nothing. A number of students from those classes told me just that. And when she returned after Christmas, she stopped coming to my class entirely but continued to "teach" the other classes. What I don't know.....

A guy here at work asked me if I would ever teach again. My response was absolutely, but under my terms and conditions...non-negotiable. While I got paid a small amount, I wasn't doing it for the money. As long a list as my gripes are, the positives still out-weighed the negatives. The bottom line is that school occurs at roughly the same time as my real job, and it's pretty hard to be in two places as once. If money were no object, I'd teach full time, I truly would. But honestly, what made it enjoyable is that I was a wanna-be and didn't have to attend staff meetings and could do anything I wanted. I just brought in my server and set it up, not bothering to go through channels. My lesson plans were a joke and I didn't follow them. So my independence from the system is what made the system enjoyable. Maybe it would be less enjoyable if I truly had to play by the rules.