Three days of back-to-back meetings, lots of random conversations, planning, typing, working, running kids back and forth to places, and I am completely and utterly exhausted, but . . . I am just thrilled to be in this position.  I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to being a part of a real community.  In my former life, I did a lot of extras–went to campus wide meetings and lectures, volunteered for things–and it never seemed to make me part of the community.  Today, I was asked to chaperon an overnight trip.  I was thrilled to be asked and immediately said I’d go.  They were so excited and relieved I’d said yes, and I said, and I really meant, please, ask me any time, that’s what I’m here for.  Because it is.  I really want to make a contribution to the school, to individual girls’ lives, and by extension, to the world.  To do that takes commitment and a lot of hard work.  And I’m perfectly willing to do that work.  And I know that sounds a little pie in the sky, naive, or whatever, but I really truly mean it.  And I’ve learned over the years how to balance hard work with down time.

I sense that I’ll be just as exhausted after next week when the kids return, but in a weird way, I feel energized as well.

• Lots and lots of meetings, which are exhausting, but which, believe it or not, I’m enjoying.
• I enjoy the meetings because the tone of them is awesome.  Positive, grateful for everyone’s hard work, honest, open.  I haven’t been to a meeting like that in ages.
• Some of the same complications exist at my new place as existed at the old.  They’re minor.  They’re knowable, and they’re easily avoided or fixed.
• So far, I like the people I’ll be working with most closely.  They’re smart, insightful and pleasant to be around.
• I am struggling with names, but I’ve freely asked people who they are.  I’m starting to remember some of them.
• I am looking forward to working on curriculum for next year
• I have in my mind that I need to distinguish between computing and technology (something I know I’ve harped on here before).  So far, people seem to get that I’m not an expert in your day-to-day applications, that my specialty is finding appropriate technology for pedagogy and that what I teach to the kids veers more toward computing than technology.

Once the kids actually show up, I’ll have more, but that’s what’s in my head for now.

For the last two years, despite having work off and on, I still had plenty of time to do things around the house, and so, during the week, when kids and Mr. Geeky weren’t around, I’d tackle some big project.  I’d clean out a closet or, as I did a couple of months ago, re-paint the living room.  Sometimes we’d all tackle something as a family on the weekend, but mostly, we reserved the weekends for fun.  I realized on Saturday morning that house projects were not going to happen during the week anymore, so I looked around the house and thought, “What needs to get done before school starts?”  Two things stood out.  One, the garden, which I’d mostly neglected all summer.  And two, that living room painting project, which turned into a living room and hallway painting project.  And, I’m happy to say, I finished both.  Geeky Girl and Mr. Geeky helped me tackle the garden, and I’ve now promised myself to spend a little time there every weekend.  And I finished the hallway, which was what was left of the painting project.  I still have some touching up to do, which I plan to tackle next weekend.  But, boy, does it feel good to not have those things hanging over my head.  Every time I walked up to the front door, I’d see the garden and bemoan its sorry state.  And then I’d enter the house, look up the stairs and think, “I should finish that.”  And now, I’ll feel a sense of accomplishment instead.

Today is our 16th anniversary.  As usual, we’re just a little too preoccupied to fully enjoy it.  Since we’ve functioned on the academic calendar our whole lives, the 27th of August is always right before the beginning of school or right in the middle of it.  We often don’t get each other anything as the end of August used to also be a time of scarce funds.  In grad school days, we sometimes hadn’t been paid yet and of course, our pay kind of sucked.  This year, Mr. Geeky claims he’s gotten me a couple of small things.  And I got some just a little too pricey wine.  I had hoped to get a bottle of 1994 wine, but that’s not the kind of thing you just go out and get at the last minute–especially not in our state-controlled liquor stores. We will likely go out to dinner.  My cold is still with me, though kept in check with Dayquil and Halls.  On the one hand, I’m glad I’m not sick for the first day of school.  On the other hand, it’s too bad I’m not 100% for the anniversary.  After 16 years, though, one thing I know is that Mr. Geeky won’t mind.

Well, it’s not completely done, but here’s a little tour of the lab so far.

In the back is a small group of computers where my two, yes two!, computer graphics students will meet, so I designated it the computer art corner. Underneath the art I’ve already posted, I’ll be posting student work, which is what I plan to do in all the sections of the room.

And around the corner from that is the gaming section. I’m sad this photo didn’t turn out better. I think it’s my favorite sign.

Then, there is the Internet/Communication section. That’s what 6th grade will focus on. I hope to post screen shots of their web sites.

And here is the digital storytelling section. The students will be creating a couple of videos (very simple ones given the amount of time we have). Again, I hope to grab some screen shots to put up on the wall.

And around the room, there are little surprises peeking out from various places. I plan to add a few more of these as well as a section for robotics and “digital” reading.

It’s been fun, though exhausting, to do all of this. Geeky Girl helped me a lot. I don’t know what I would have done without her. I can’t wait until the kids see the results.

Although I have tons of questions and still feel that what my job is going to really be like is somewhat of a mystery, I’m starting to feel pretty confident about what I’m about to do.  Over the weekend, I met with a former student of both mine and Mr. Geeky’s who will be teaching at a similar school–well, at the Obama’s kids’ school.  She’s in almost the exact same position I’m in in terms of developing a curriculum for HS Computer Science.  The biggest difference is that she was hired much earlier and so had the spring to talk to administrators and set a course for the coming year.  Also, she doesn’t teach middle school or do technology support, but otherwise, very similar.  Her plans for upper school computer science were very similar to mine.  It was nice to confirm that I’m not crazy. So my big mystery is knowing what course I can set for next year and what Computer Science will look like at my school.  My ideas are starting to solidify, but whether or not I’ll be able to put my ideas into action is yet to be seen. I’m floundering a bit for what role to play in all of it, how much to push my ideas, etc.  Because I don’t know the actors or the structure within which I’m going to be working.  I feel positive, if a bit befuddled, about the whole thing.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying contemplating my middle school classes.  Here is the web site I’ve constructed for all my courses.  My hope is to post student work there as well as having it be an information hub.  I might have to move my site, probably next year, to the school server, but for now, this is where it’s going to live.  As I’ve described what I’m doing to parents and teachers, they’ve all reacted in a really positive way.  I’m hoping, too, to let the teachers know what students are learning, so that they can potentially incorporate and expand on what I’m doing with them.  I didn’t get the lab decorated very much yesterday, both because my energy level was really low, and because I spent a chunk of time talking to the head librarian, also new, and with whom I share an office.  Geeky Girl has promised to go in with me today and help.  I definitely need another pair of eyes.

I have a cold.  Officially.  Mostly it’s in my throat and ears, though I have some sneezing and sniffling.  And yesterday, I popped my head into school for more than a few minutes, so it’s official, I’m a teacher.  I’m sort of bummed that I’m under the weather at this particular moment.  It makes it difficult to really enjoy everything that’s going on.  Next week is the real first week, with new faculty orientation, a faculty-staff picnic, meetings and other exciting things, so I assume I’ll be well enough for those things.

I’m in a kind of weird position as half teacher and half computing support.  I don’t really have my own classroom, though I’ve been told that I can take ownership of the computer lab.  I have an “office” in the library, shared with several other people.  It feels kind of transitional, though I hope to make it feel less so in the next week or two.  Yesterday, as I meandered the hallways, I encountered a small group of new middle schoolers participating in a prep week, intended to dust off the cobwebs in their heads and to help them transition to a new school.  Geeky Girl is not participating, simply because we didn’t know about it.  I smiled and said hello to them as I passed, delighted that they were all shorter than me.  It’s a first for me, having students that are shorter than me.  I tried to think about having them sitting in front of me in the lab, working, listening to me (or not).  It’s kind of breathtaking.

The lab happens to be across from the faculty lounge, so I met a few more colleagues, all of whom were excited that I was there, hoping to take some of the burden off of them for teaching “the technical stuff.”  I have some thinking about that I need to do.  But so far, everyone I’ve met seems enthusiastic and eager to do more with technology.

Today, I’m planning on decorating the lab.  It’s actually a nice space, with a bank of windows looking out into the hallway.  The other three walls are a gray bulletin board-like material and it is these walls that I’m going to spruce up.  Right now, there are a couple of old posters and a note, I think, about logging off.  All very dull.  I’ve been given free reign.  I’ve printed out some things.  I went to a teacher store and bought a couple of things, though I’m sorely disappointed at the lack of fun stuff they have about technology.  Internet safety and keyboarding, bleh.  Right now, I’m planning a corner with computer-generated art, an area for robots, an area with gaming and Scratch, and cute things everywhere.  I want it to be fun in there.  I promise pictures.

Close readers of this blog have probably noticed more than one post about how I think technology in education is overhyped and that we could all benefit from stepping back a bit and thinking a little harder about how we use technology in education.  In higher ed, more so than in K-12, there’s a tendency to use technology to automate, to gain efficiencies, choose your business-speak term here.  CMS’s no longer are about changing the game of teaching, but are about 24/7 access to materials, managing grades and assessment, making it “easy” for faculty to post things online.  Video isn’t for thinking about material in a different, more visual way, nor is it something that students create, but again, it’s a way to distribute lectures to ever larger classes.  Technology, at the institutional level, isn’t about teaching and learning.  It’s about a bottom line–somewhere.  That’s not to say that there aren’t individual faculty and students out there using technology to transform the way they teach and learn.  Most of those people, for the record, are not using a CMS for those purposes.

At all levels of education, there is sometimes a tendency to throw technology into the classroom because it’s there, because it’s good to say that every classroom has a Smartboard or set of laptops or iPod touches.  And then, administrators, parents, etc. want those expensive things to be used.  The problem is many people put the cart before the horse.  Technology should be used to solve a problem.  A problem shouldn’t be created in order to use technology.  Let me give a personal example.  In teaching writing, I had a problem of getting students to understand what it means to write for an audience.  Writing teachers everywhere start to recognize when a paper is written “for the teacher.”  The 5-paragraph theme comes to mind.  I turned to blogging, a technology, to solve this problem.  As it turned out, it solved a whole host of other problems as well, and turned out to be a fabulous tool for teaching, imo, almost anything.  The idea of writing to learn has been around for a long time.  Blogging to learn takes that to another level.

The question, then, that often gets asked is, “What can I use x (technology) for?”  The real question should be, “I have x problem with my pedagogy, how can I solve it?”  And, if technology integration is important, then one might start with some ideas around technology, but non-technical solutions should always also be considered.

So, I still believe in the power of technology to transform education, but I see the implementation of technology in many educational settings as wrong-headed.  There are lots of reasons for that–from resistance to change to being in crisis mode (21st century skills, OMG!) to slick sales presentations.  And I see educational technologists as sometimes part of the problem.  A while back, I wrote:

I would say the same thing to the technology people out there whining about how people won’t use technology, how they don’t understand the changes it’s bringing, etc.  First, I’d say think a little more critically about the technology you’re espousing.  Too many technologists out there really sound more like evangelists, trying to convince people to use the snake oil.  I understand.  I was there.  I felt the frustration, the worry.  But I think technologists need to acknowledge the fear and the skepticism, not dismiss it as ridiculous.  Yes, it’s a barrier, but not one that you knock down with a bulldozer.  It needs to be dismantled bit by bit and it needs to be done with the help of the people that put it up in the first place.  And we need to acknowledge that sometimes technology isn’t the answer and that some technology is being used in ways that are counterproductive to teaching and learning.  Not everyone needs to blog and twitter and create multimedia presentations.   Too often faculty see us as pushers of tools rather than as partners in education.  And sometimes that’s because we project that attitude as often as that attitude is projected onto us.

In our zeal to get people as excited as we were about technology, we sometimes scare people away or cause them to dig their heels in.

My second shift in thinking about technology is similar to the first, but kind of different.  Among the tech savvy educators I hang out with virtually, in person, and otherwise, I’m seeing a trend for not going beyond the applications.  Now that I’ve spent my summer thinking about computing as opposed to technology, I’m starting to have a different kind of skepticism toward some kinds of technology.  My goal now is to get computing into as many classes as possible.  What does that mean?  It means data visualization not creating charts in Excel.  It means creating art with a computer program (like Processing), not Illustrator.  It means coding up HTML, CSS, & PHP not using Blogger.  It means creating maps with GIS or Google Earth, not using Google Maps.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love the way that many applications have lowered the barrier of entry for doing things like blogging or editing images, but I see it as my job now to get under the hood, to learn something about the code underneath so that we have students who can create the next Facebook or Angry Birds.  So I’m starting to think, when someone wants to incorporate blogs or Google Docs or video, that’s great, but how can we take that to the next level.  And it doesn’t have to be that particular teacher who takes it there.  I’m not expecting your average history teacher to know HTML or Python or some other programming tool, but what I’m hoping is that the students will know and that they might be given the opportunity to create a historical map using some of the computing skills they have.  And this is where my thinking is going.

Well, all of us but Geeky Girl.  I joined a swim club this summer, a different one than the one we’ve joined in previous years.  The previous club was connected to Mr. Geeky’s current and my former place of employment.  It was nice, familiar, pleasant, but I got tired of seeing former colleagues.  I wanted a change.  Well, we finally went to our new club this afternoon for the first time, mostly because I was feeling guilty about not going.  I dragged Geeky Girl and Geeky Boy.  Geeky Girl was perfectly content.  There were a couple of her friends there and she went down the slide and off the diving board.  Geeky Boy: miserable.  I apologized.  We sat on the edge of the pool noting that there was no one there between the ages of say, 13/14 and 25.  1 year olds, check.  80 year olds, check.  30 and 40-something moms (and lots of dads!), check.  Lots of 10-12 year old girls. But no teenagers.  I promised not to make him go again.  And I’m thinking maybe next summer, I will cancel my membership.

As someone who didn’t win the brass ring, I very glad I’m not a part of a system that seems to me to be in such a mess.  Dean Dad, again, has some clear-eyed analysis of some of the problems in higher ed.  Earlier this week, I read an article about someone who turns away grad students because she thinks they have no shot at a job and it’s not fair to lead them astray.  I sympathize with adjuncts.  I do.  I was one.  But I’m on the side of a lot of people who say, just walk away.  If you don’t get the financial terms you need to make it worthwhile, walk away.  The more adjuncts that walk away, the more likely it is that colleges might actually have to figure out an alternative, whether that be to make the tenured and t-t faculty teach more classes or to come up with a way to employ more permanent teachers who have a decent salary and benefits.  There are other things to do with your degree.

I have no actual hopes that that will happen, but I think you have a better shot of staging a kind of protest by walking away than by demanding a pay increase.  If you’re not willing to leave–collectively–you have nothing to bargain with.