Return to the Classroom

 I've been thinking of this for a while. When I go out to schools, why do teachers listen to me? I may be considered an expert in educational technology but I haven't been in a classroom in years. When I was teaching, I always hated those so-called experts that rode in on their hypothetical white horse to serve as the white knight saving the day with a new program or software. Something that they claim would make my life as a teacher that much easier.

This past year my career has gone through a lot of changes. While I'm looking for my next adventure, I decided to return to the classroom. This decision though included a decision within the decision. I know that I'm the type of person that wouldn't want to leave mid-year but I also knew I wanted to keep looking for a new role that would allow me to work with a variety of educators and continue presenting at conference.

As this new school year begins, I have placed my name on the substitute teacher list for a few local organizations. This past week, I spent the entire week in one high school classroom while they waited for a new teacher to finish on-boarding. This opportunity was even more interesting because Sunday night, the charter school system where I was substitute teacher was hit with a network outage that lasted the entire week.

This was my first time in a classroom since pre-Covid shutdowns and there I am in a room full of high school students with Chromebooks who can't use their Chromebooks. Not only was the outage the internet, but also the VOIP phone lines, email systems, and loudspeakers. It was crazy to see how much this school relied on their network. A news article about the outage showed the network's administration "...stated the issue did not impact classroom instruction. However, students and parents disagreed, especially since much of the instruction is online and Chromebooks are used."

I walked into the building as was told students had assignments on Google Classroom to complete. Ten minutes later, the dean of students walked in with a stack of photocopies. The students even asked what the packets had to do with Physics and Chemistry (the classes I was responsible for) because they were articles about famous scientists with ELA style questions. The dean told me she found them in the previous teacher's emergency files because even the copy machines were down due to the network. 

I spent a full week with these students and Monday afternoon, after speaking with the dean, I bought some offline supplies in. While students were still provided packets every day, I had the dean's permission to do other things. I understand that Physics and Chemistry aren't the same but I am not a Chemistry teacher and I also didn't want to do anything too extreme while a guest in the school. We ended up doing the paper tower challenge. This is an activity I normally do as an ice breaker for adults but it was great for the students. Each group was given six sheets of copy paper and one foot of tape. I then gave each group one text book form the book shelf.

Since I was a guest, I didn't not take any pictures in the classroom but I was very impressed by the engineering skills these students demonstrated. I'm excited to see where I'm sent next.