The job that saves your life

This refers to the great episode of This American Life called The Job That Takes Over Your Life. It's not a particularly brilliant episode, but Ira Glass captures that feeling of a bad workplace. Unless you're incredibly new to your working life, or incredibly lucky, you've had the bad workplace. We can all relate. However, in the years since I first heard this episode, I've gone back to this thought: What about the job that saves your life?

The thing about IT in education is it is a constant string of re-births. Like anyone in IT, you deal with being a customer service bitch. You deal with misplaced anger, passive agression, agression, incredulity, disappointment, and feelings of personal betrayal. It's not your fault. You're not a chip. You're just the guy that has to pamper the chip when it misbehaves. It's not you that lacks empathy. It's the chip. Unfortunately, in a weird reverse synecdoche, you represent the chip and all it's failings in being more human. So where is the re-birth?

The re-birth comes when you're leaving the office, the empty classroom, the dark systems suite to trip over five girls sitting in the hall in a pile of sneakers, rehersing their lines for drama class. It comes around lunchtime when you almost close your office door because of the screaming in the hall. Screaming! No one screams in a not-for-profit, a mutual fund, a law firm. But, like a daily mantra, you pause and tell yourself "That screaming is why I am here." And, like I was taught in Sunday School, I turn, door open, to go back to answering the phone calls, the e-mails, and worrying about lack of funding, administrative battles and behavioural problems. This is my offering. Because those screams, those giggles, those whispers. They say : "This do in rememberance of us."

The Bridge to Social Media

It's been going on like this for days.

Gayle, our Lower School Admissions Associate (some title, right?), has decided to single-handedly crusade for full social media awareness at Children's Prep. I admire her. I sit in on Webinars with her from FinalSite and Whipple Hill and Blackbaud. I talk about Twitter with her. I explain it the best I can understand it (although who really knows if that's good enough). We talk about LinkedIn and Facebook. We e-mail the Alumni Director (Alumni Directors always seem on top of this stuff). She tells us what she has been doing. She suggests maybe making admissions pages that are similar to her Alum pages. But Gayle doesn't like that.

I know what Gayle wants. I get it. She's not much older than me (and I'm not very old). If she could be the school and update current students and parents as well as prospective families about when she eats, sleeps and holds open houses, she would. But she's not quite sure how to go about that, and I'm not quite sure she should be the school.

"We have a Communications Director for this," I suggest to her. Although Gayle knows as well as I that by Communications, they mean Print Communications. Par for the course in independent schools. We don't even have anyone that actively monitors our Wikipedia page. Lord knows how the information got up there. I fix it from time to time, but it's more casual than anything else.

Gayle sighs. "I just wish we could, you know, already be there."

"So few schools are there...wherever there is. The bar keeps raising. I mean, the bar is at iTunes U at this point. And we can barely maintain our Moodle."

She nods. "It's just, like, other schools are already doing this. The Greene School has a dedicated webmaster who keeps all their social media in order."

"Don't worry about the Greene School. Parents don't come here for our Facebook page as much as Parents don't go to Greene for their campus." I sit for a second and think. That was the correct phrasing. I hope. Ugh. Probably not. Greene has an ugly campus. That's what you need to know.

"I suppose. What should we Twitter about?" She looks down at the Macbook in front of us. We created a Twitter account and now it is begging us to tell it what we are doing.

"I'm not sure. They're mowing the lawn outside..."

Gayle laughs and her forehead relaxes. "It's funny, it feels more serious than it actually is."

"It is serious. Just not...totally serious. Being relaxed and social is serious."

"Yeah. Serious business." She types.

A great day to study on the Great Lawn with your friends!

Socially relaxing seriously. Right.

Virtual Ization

We're talking about being green, here. Not even environmental green. I'm talking Gordon Gekko green, fucking Scrooge McDuck green. I said fucking. It's appropriate.

I mean, yeah, we'll say environmental green, because it's that, too. And environmental green is awesome. It certainly makes us more excited than the other type of green. We're a school, and heck, we have to teach kids to be responsible citizens. We're concerned about power consumption, we're concerned about chemical waste, we're concerned about powering iPhones with stationary bikes. We like that stuff. But seriously, did you see the numbers over a three year period? It's green. The other kind.

Our CFO only sees 2008-9 budget savings. And herein lies the problem. We have sold this as environmentally sound to ourselves. It is. We have sold this as moving into 21st century. Or the 22nd. Or whatever. To our constituents. We have hawked our goods until our throats were dry to everyone who will listen. Vendors, other schools, teachers, our wives. We want it bad. We want a challenge that will save us money, save us power and give us that little extra boost in efficiency, man hours, whatever. We want it so bad, we figured out how to finance it in our own budget, with no special money, no donors, no board appeals. And then, the economy tanks. Bond rates rise. Investments fall. So we have to look at the other green. Not the man hours green - which we need so badly. Not the efficiency green - no one outside our department really knows what it is we do, anyway. We have to boil this almost universally beneficial project down to numbers. Pivot tables. Graphs.

We know we have to do this. Number crunching. It's not a total surprise - well, not being able to spend our own budget is a total surprise, but the rest...eh, par for the course. But listen, schools should do this. All of them. Every single school that has a server should do this. Server software is free. Processors are under-utilized. Cooling is expensive. Hardware is expensive. Maintaining it is expensive. Your sysadmin's time is probably very expensive. If you don't have a sysadmin and you do everything yourself, you damn well know how expensive your life is. And if you don't, you should probably look into another field.

Information is cheap, and if your sysadmin can read, you should at least try.

You.

Do it for us. We may not get to.

The Sick Day

typingtest.com is blocked on the web filter, but facebook.com isn't - my ninth graders thought that was hilarious. Do you think you can fix it? Sorry to bother...

After staying out late the night before with, ahem, some fellow ed-techies and feeling something nasty in the back of my throat, I woke up with no voice and what felt like the flu. Not so great when you find yourself not only talking, but repeating all day. I opted to stay home, if only to stop the nasty cycle of viruses in schools. You get sick, but you come anyway and pass it on to 25 third-graders, who then pass it on to the entire school community. That is, unless, you're one of those folks at the end of the chain. Then, it probably just doesn't matter. I don't like to chance being Typhoid Mary, though.

After waking up to my usual alarm, I stay awake, because I know the e-mails and/or phone calls may start at any moment. I check in on our server, which is doing OK. E-mail is outsourced, so that's reliable. Sara, the High School tech integrator, reaches me by 10:30 with the web filter e-mail.

Of course, even when I don't touch the web filter, it can get wonky. I remote back into our server to take a look.

I'm not a huge fan of our web filter. As far as web filters go, ours is great, but in concept, the two of us don't mix. Most parents want to hear we have one of these, and our administration, fearful of the particularly litigious parents, always want the safe side. So, we have one, and I pick my battles, so my dislike for them is only conversational at Children's Prep School. Folks have yet to put our (somewhat unusual) allowance of facebook.com and my conversational dislike of web filters together. I suspect I'll hear it from the head at some point, but two and a half years in, I haven't heard a peep. And, if he says something, I know I can distract him with the endowment. Works like a charm...

I do a quick browse and see that typingtest.com is categorized as "Game Playing." I have to do this frequently because the updates on our webfilter sometimes changes categorizations of innocuous websites to categories that are blocked. I mostly chuckle at this, but teachers and students find it frustrating, especially if they could see that website the day before. I think quickly about unblocking just the domain and then think about Occam. I set the entire "Game Playing" category to Monitor instead of Block. We'll see how this goes. Even though I don't like filtering, I do have fun playing with the filter itself. It's a mean little tool, and even if I don't block everything folks think I should, it's best used when teachers think students are doing something questionable on a computer in class, but are afraid to confront the student themselves - or because the student is just too fast. I just have to do a quick search through the filter's logs, and blocked or not, the student's traffic is there.

Some students say that my system of doing things is a little creepy - like big brother. I suppose it could be if I watched the traffic scroll by all day. But I don't. I depend on the students to do somethign stupid before I actually log into this thing. And then, hopefully, I won't have to look at it again for a very long time.

Not Exactly Typing Class

"But do you teach typing?" I blink at the parent standing across from me. A difficult question.

You see, I was taught typing. I'm thankful for it everyday, but it bored me to tears. I test drive all our typing software personally, for at least a half hour before deployment. I don't put stuff out there that bores me or that I find hard to use. I want the kids to use it. I see where their parents are coming from. Typing is useful. However, my department gets such limited class time with our kids - even with our attempts at integration - that, sometimes, formal home-keys training gets pushed aside.

"We practice it in the lower grades," I say carefully "and we keep a list of free and low-cost typing programs that Annabelle can use from home, if you feel she needs extra practice."

Dennis, my former boss, was never taught typing. In fact, in my former department of eight, I was the only one who could touch type. And it's that that I think about when I talk about typing. Fellow IT and teaching professionals, who I thoroughly admire, and none of them could touch type. Is lacking that skill really that bad?

"Well, The Johns School teaches typing and has laptops for every child - what can you offer that they can't?" I look for help from Jane, the Admissions Director, who, I'm sure, did not plan this cornering. She raises her eyebrows waiting for my response. I look back at the parents. "Ma'am, while we don't offer a laptop for every child, we do offer an 8:1 student-teacher ratio, and open labs for all students. As far as typing goes, our graduated students consistently report feeling better prepared with computers skills than their peers when they enter college. I'd like to think we have an excellent program that focuses on a diverse set of critical thinking and creative skills. Not just typing."

It's a load, partially. This woman has been visiting schools all month. A mouthful of computer curricula jibberish can't really match up to a "free" laptop for her child. You can hold a laptop.

Jane begins a shpeil about our new gymnasium and they start down the hallway. What's difficult about this scenario is that these students will be entering a world that we don't know how to prepare them for. All Thomas Friedman aside, the best these parents can ask is that we are actively aware of that fact. The "free" laptop is just icing.