Category: Blog

I’ve been operating in crisis mode all year, it’s week 7, and it is no fun. 

It’s made me go downhill physically and mentally, so I am stopping now, and taking control of the situation.

First thing, is that I got up this morning and got ahead on all of my classes so far except 1, my Technical Support class, and I’m going back to that now, and getting ahead on that.

Second, I’m going to establish some firm goals on what I am going to try to accomplish both short and long term.

Next, I’m going to try to isolate Campus Technology work to 4th period and before school.

The good news, is that we’ve only got 3 more days until the RIF day: October 15th.

I’ve been with Dallas ISD for 18 years.  I tried to hire on as an emergency certified teacher right before they had a RIF at the beginning of the school year.  I went on to get certified traditionally through Texas Woman’s University.  By the way, I’m certified in both CS and Math because I want the job stability of teaching math.  Plus back in the old days, I actually taught a class called Computer Math.  Still have a couple of copies of the textbook.

I think we had another RIF at the beginning of the school year a few years after I hired, but I don’t know for sure.

But the main reason I went into teaching was to avoid layoffs. I went through a bunch of RIFs at all three of the corporations I worked at before teaching.  Never fun.

I’ve been through other fun times — superintendent who misspent money and went to jail for it.  P-Card scandal.  Contractors stealing from us.  It’s been fun.

So the latest?  Last year the district over spent by $64 million dollars and if they don’t stop it, the over spending will hit $84 million.

The problem?  They over hired by over 1000 employees.  That’s 5% of the district employees.

Here’s what I’ve been told so far:

Our school is two teachers short according to student head count.  So we’re in good shape.  Superintendent wants to RIF according to school and department.

However, the "union" wants them to rank the teachers and RIF according to rank.  Meaning that all Algebra I teachers would be ranked, etc.  I probably wouldn’t be RIFed, as I would be in the top 3 CS teachers (number two by seniority, not sure how the TAG teacher would be ranked with the two senior general high school teachers, which is why I’m ranking us together).  The good news, is that we still had an opening at the TAG school last I heard. 

TEA is threatening to step in and they haven’t said how they would do the RIF.

Frankly, I think someone should be going to jail, this has certainly had more repercussions than buying tacky bedroom furniture did.

And I think if I do get RIFed, I’ll go quietly and figure out how to teach CS online — which I’ve done before.

The worst part, is that they knew about this problem back in May, and it would have been much less painful for everyone if they had dealt with it then.

One of my duties as teacher tech is to be of technical assistance through the fingerprinting process. 

The state legislature finally decided that we had too many convicted felons working as teachers, especially they want to get rid of the sex offenders.  At least that’s what I hope.

So we all have to be fingerprinted.

Fun process.  First, everyone has to make sure their SBEC profile is correct.  Have had teachers who have had the wrong birthdate on the teaching certificate FOREVER, use 4 different permutations of their name, and quite a few who have never changed their names on the certificates to match their driver’s license.

We’re supposed to get emails tomorrow, though we got the schedule today.  I’m predicting that our district email system is going to blow a gasket.  Hopefully I’m wrong.

Last, twenty four hours before the actual event, we’re supposed to print something called a FastPass.

Oh, and during the event, I’m supposed to make sure that the fingerprinters have internet access etc.  So tomorrow I’m going to drag my tech support class downstairs with my laptops and check that.  (All of two students so far).

Oh, and everyone keeps jumping the gun on the Fastpass and freaking out.  My main job on this is walk people through the process and make them keep breathing.

Wednesday REALLY stressed me out.  At the end of the day, I sent an email to the principal asking him for help in setting boundaries.

Then I got in a note in my box telling me of a meeting with him at noon.  I thought it was in response to my email, but no, it was in response to the incident in my classroom on Wednesday.  Principal said that there would be a meeting in his office, 4:00 pm on Friday with the other teacher, myself, him and the associate principal of instruction. 

Seems the other teacher was very upset and angry with me and was threatening to "take me out".  Seriously, he said that twice.  I do know how to handle these situations, taught well in AFROTC in college, and again in tech support at TI.  Basically the customer is never wrong.

I am seeing a PhD psychiatrist right now due to the stress at the end of the last school year and something we talk about a lot is setting boundaries.  I was already booked to see him last night, and he reiterated that position.  Husband felt the same way.  And of course I know it.

The best way to win in a confrontation, is to make the other person feel that they won.  In fact, it’s even basic clicker training.  I’d already decided that I needed to apologize for her hurt feelings and acknowledge that perhaps I should have taken the issue out in the hall.  However, I do know that after this incident, no one in my sixth period class is going to pull out a cell phone, and probably no adult.

To my surprise, shortly after 8:00 am this morning the other teacher showed up in my room and walked to talk to me.  I was very taken aback since she’d threatened me, but I allowed her to stay and sit down, and she was willing to leave a student working in the classroom who needed help.  I was glad I had someone there to get help if I needed it.

I started by apologizing for her hurt behavior and that I should have discussed with her in the hall.

She started then by complimenting my classroom management skills and apologizing for her behavior, especially her conversation with the principal.  Of course, all is forgiven and I did ask her for help in learning to deal with people.

Mentioned us computer types would prefer working in the basement with a room for of computers and please throw us snickers once in a while — a combination of my shrinks classification and my husband’s.

Man is life fun.

I ran my pink sheets downstairs today and while I was gone, another teacher came into my room looking for me.

First, I don’t like sending students out for errands like that, they should be on the computer.  Second, I need the exercise.

So I come back into my room, to find the other teacher ON HER CELLPHONE.  I had to wait for several minutes for her to end her conversation before I could even find out what she wanted.

Here’s the issue:  1) she was disrupting my students, and 2), the principal said no cellphones in classrooms by teachers.

I did tell her that I found the behavior objectionable, and that she owned my students an apology.  She said it was okay because it was school business.

NOT IN MY ROOM IT ISN’T!

I report tomorrow.  We have two days of staff development, a convocation at American Airlines Center (getting there will be a PITA), and two teacher workdays.

This will be my 18th year of teaching computer science, and the 18th year in the same classroom.

I suspect I handle the beginning of a big uniquely, but it works for me.  I spent this weekend at a dog agility trial, and will do the same next weekend.  In fact, I’m scheduled for Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which means I’ll take one of our teacher workdays as a vacation — that is IF I decide to go on Friday.

I’m actually pretty ready.  Office Depot had their teacher appreciation discount last week, so I went last Sunday and got supplies.  I spent half a day the week before working on putting my classroom together, and spent Friday afternoon.  (That equals the day I’m taking off, by the way).  Went I left Friday, all computers were up and talking to the teacher workstation, server, and the internet.  So I can teach there now, without doing anything else.

My next task is to build a new student image.  I want to put Microsoft One Note and Microsoft Expression web on the images.  I also want to set of the workstations so building JCreator projects are easy.

I spent the summer writing our curriculum for Computer Science I (Visual Basic), and Pre AP Computer Science I (Java), so right now I’m waiting for our district specialist to start setting that up.  I also have AP Computer Science I (A) set up — but currently fu-barred and AP Computer Science II (AB) set up but don’t have my lesson plans set up yet.  I’ll work on that during the evenings next week, and probably quite a bit next weekend at the show site.

I’m pretty happy about next year, I have the schedule I want, and I’ll find out which kids and how many by the end of the end.  So far, so good, and I’ll use the agility trials to keep me from stressing out about school.

I have apparently figured out the agility blood sugar problem.  Today I ate "lunch" before I left for the trial — about 9:45.  My blood sugar stayed in the 140-150 range all day until just before my last run, which I started drifting down.  Since they had a concessionaire and it was open, I grabbed a corn dog, ate half before the run and ate half after.

Very nice to see.

Agility runs aren’t going well, but I’ve really got to lose some weight before I see good runs.

Still not entirely sure how I got this working, but here’s the next step for my new image…

Templates for JCreator:

The Gridworld templates are coming in REAL handy, as it takes seconds to start up a Gridworld project.  Not sure if I’ll use the others this year or not.

Would also be good for media computation stuff.

I’m taking an AP Computer Science AB teacher workshop at UTD and I’m using One Note.

I’ve been trying One Note all summer, as I want to use it in my classroom. 

This workshop, the presenter has given us his slides before he presents, which I finally really useful, as you can import the slides into One Note and make your own notes.

I can see making my slides available at the beginning of class, having my students grab them and making notes on them as class goes on.

I really think this will improve class, so one of the first things I need to do when I get back, is to at One Note to the workstation image.

I’ve finally got a few minutes to sit down and digest the Alice/Media Computation workshop.

First, it was good.

Second, they gave us lots of good ideas.

And media computation is using software, in this case Java, to manipulate images.  One of the first books on it is available on line and was written by a prominent computer scientist:

http://spinroot.com/pico/index.html 

Beyond Photography, The Digital Darkroom, by Gerard J. Holzmann

Both Barb Ericson and Steve Cooper have been teaching media computation in their Computer Science courses.  There is some information at

http://home.cc.gatech.edu/TeaParty