Conferences

I'm sitting here in my computer lab at St. Ignatius School, where parent/teacher conferences are going on all over the building. It feels strange--to be a teacher required to be in the building, but not really having any conferences! I had one parent stop in to check on her son's progress. I also went to another one where there was a student who had trouble in my class last week, but that parent didn't show (this perhaps explains more behind the student's behavior). As a specialist, I am required to be at school, but I have two schools to be at! So, I've been using the time to update the lab.

GEEK ALERT: I uninstalled the newest version of Internet Explorer. last week I installed IE7 on all the computers in the Windows XP lab, but according to my testing, IE7 takes approximately 7 seconds longer to load the same page than IE6! When you're dealing with students with a short attention span who have never dealt with dial-up and a world without microwaves, it's hard to wait 10 seconds for the class homepage to come up! There are a few reports out there about IE7 and its speed. Personally, I'm a Firefox fan, but I'd like to stick with IE for now. We'll see if a fix comes along before I upgrade though.

It's been kind of fun hanging around school tonight, however. I've been able to have casual conversations with my colleagues about subjects from swiss army knives to floffels to youtube to polycarbonate molding!

Yesterday my principal had asked me if I could take morning yard duty for her since she had an early morning meeting. You see, when the kids come in the morning, they run around the school yard for about 20 minutes before school opens for them. The principal is the only adult out there, and I imagine it can get busy out there before school (although things are generally more quiet early on rather than later).

Anyway, I was a little nervous about how things would go. I usually only have 15 students who I am responsible for at a time, and I didn't know how they would handle the dynamic of me addressing the school at one time. Well, I don't see how it could have gone better! Some of the things I had going for me was I know almost all the kids--even the kids I don't teach know me because I come into their classroom to work on their computer. I found my voice got more firm and had more authority in it. Kinda cool? I think so.

The biggest fulfilling part of the experience was that I felt the kids respect me. Sure, they may talk in my class from time to time, but they listen when I want them to. That, above everything else, makes me feel successful at my job.