The Many Shirts of the Modern Educator
Full Time SPED Teacher; Part Time Tech Support
Any of you who are educators of any stripe have likely been victimized by the technology various schools districts have found need of rolling out to kick-start the new school year. I feel your pain.
I don’t have an issue with Zoom, though I find its interfacing a touch awkward. Office 365 is fine. I am taking all the courses to be a certified MS trainer educator. Adobe Creative Cloud…steep learning curve. But I’ll tackle that too.
My albatross is the laptop the district gave me. Let me be clear, I am thankful beyond measure to have a job. My district bent over backwards to not fire anyone. Then they had to purchase hundreds of tablets and laptops for the students. Now that I have been duly grateful, let me vent.
I call it the Lenovo WFSFY computer. We Felt Sorry For You. It’s a dusty old machine with minimal specs that trundles along to its goals. I usually make coffee after I open a taxing program on it like sticky notes or a settings window. I3, 4 gigs of ram, a hazy screen.
I don’t want to work at home. At home, however, is a brand-new custom-built PC that can have 109 windows open and hum along like daisies in sunshine. I’m not sure daisies hum but they should.
Anyway, that computer was built to power PC game. Now, it power PC teaches. Along with my iPad Air as a camera and makeshift document camera. Did I mention the tips and tricks one must learn when even the affluent districts-such as mine-is stretched thing trying to provide in the COVID-19 era.
I keep browsing the laptop sales. Of course, being who I am, I gravitate towards the more overly resourced end of the spectrum. The 16' MacBook Pro i9. The Asus ProArt 17'. I even thought about a Windows Surface but for the life of me can’t understand the price to performance metric of those machines. The point is, something in the range of i5-Ryzen 5 area would suffice, but these purchases are rare for me, so I want the beast mode version of most tech.
I’ll trudge along. I’ll make it all work. The kids need it. I’m new enough in the profession to still think it’s a calling. I hope it stays that way.