The REAL teaching began on 8/5 (and ended on 8/13!)

That was the shortest job I ever held! Boy was I in over my head! I had four courses to teach (one with two sections) for a total of five 50-minute classes every day. While it's true that the administrative tasks took almost all of my time, and that there were logistical problems that kept me from being effective, the real problem was my hearing. I could not understand what my students were saying to me unless I walked over to the speaker and stood right in front of them. Even then, it was really difficult. Couple that with my long-standing inability to remember names, and I was doomed. 

I've only now recovered my composure and gotten my head back to some version of together. It's definitely the end of my K-12 teaching career. Those seven days cost me about $1,500/day. 

Oh well, now I can concentrate on my wife's two on-line courses and help her with English.

Live and Learn!

 Microsoft is in the business of educational support, competing with Google. My school has recently switched from Google to Microsoft but the tech support guy says Microsoft isn't really any better.

Microsoft SPORK looks a lot better to me! It's a serious course content management system. I particularly like being able to, (with some lingering problems,) copy a class that someone else presented last year and then modify it to suit me. This saves a whole lot of work!

It's still a bit confusing and I see that with two sections of one course, I can create two iPlanners but I can't tell them apart. So I deleted on and asked about that.

The other problem has to do with one course of mine that seems to have to be "Mentored." but that one, I cannot access last year's courses to copy. 

This is going to be a VERY BUSY school year for me!

I wish Microsoft had some extended training for this system.

 My new job began Monday of last week (7/12). I am the one and only Computer Science teacher at Basis Tucson North.

I will be teaching four courses, one with two sections, making five periods every day. Three of the four courses are very much settled so I will do as the previous teacher did - as best I can.

The final course is called ENGINEERING and it was formerly a robotics class - in which I have no experience at all. Besides that, I'm not particularly interested in robotics. So they are allowing me to create an entirely new course to my own liking. Today, I finally got my syllabus in order and sent it to the principle for his comments. Boy is that a load-off!

Next year (how can I be thinking about next year when this year hasn't started yet) I can work on changing two courses to my liking. The final course is an AP Computer Science course and the College Board sets the curriculum so that's sort of cast in stone.

Wish me luck!

Jam