Teacher Teacher
Nov. 19th, 2004 11:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
howeirdUsually I enjoy teaching. I especially enjoy teaching Technical Stuff[TM] to bright people, and it's a bonus if they are from other countries. Tues-Fri this week I was doing just this very thing.
And it was horrible.
Instead of having time to prepare for the class and double-check the lab/classroom setup on Monday I was bombarded with tech support crises. The person who was supposed to copy the handouts for the students didn't, and when I tried, not only did the one and only double-sided printer jam, three people in the finance department were taking it apart when I went to check - it actually had jammed because they were trying to make copies while I was trying to print. So I canceled my print jobs and gave up.
Tuesday morning none of the three students had arrived by 10 am for a 9 am class. Over the course of the week, they got closer and closer to being on time, but only a little.
When we fired up the machines and installed the software, we found that all three machines had been set up wrong by the IT department in different ways for each machine, the internet connection to the lab had not been set up at all, and I needed to steal a power strip from my desk and a PC projector from a conference room.
Wed-Thu was okay, if you don't count the late arrivals and 3-hour lunch breaks. And the fact that one student didn't have enough English or technical knowledge to understand anything I was teaching. He didn't even understand the pictures.
Friday was pretty bad. I was supposed to teach a new product, the head of engineering had said on Monday she would have a copy of it for us, but she didn't, and I had to use a prototype from last summer. It took some minor programming to make it work. Not something I enjoy doing live in front of a class.
The killer was the final lesson, when I demonstrated our backup-restore tool, and it broke the server.
I need a weekend.
There's a rumor they may send me to India to teach this class again.
And it was horrible.
Instead of having time to prepare for the class and double-check the lab/classroom setup on Monday I was bombarded with tech support crises. The person who was supposed to copy the handouts for the students didn't, and when I tried, not only did the one and only double-sided printer jam, three people in the finance department were taking it apart when I went to check - it actually had jammed because they were trying to make copies while I was trying to print. So I canceled my print jobs and gave up.
Tuesday morning none of the three students had arrived by 10 am for a 9 am class. Over the course of the week, they got closer and closer to being on time, but only a little.
When we fired up the machines and installed the software, we found that all three machines had been set up wrong by the IT department in different ways for each machine, the internet connection to the lab had not been set up at all, and I needed to steal a power strip from my desk and a PC projector from a conference room.
Wed-Thu was okay, if you don't count the late arrivals and 3-hour lunch breaks. And the fact that one student didn't have enough English or technical knowledge to understand anything I was teaching. He didn't even understand the pictures.
Friday was pretty bad. I was supposed to teach a new product, the head of engineering had said on Monday she would have a copy of it for us, but she didn't, and I had to use a prototype from last summer. It took some minor programming to make it work. Not something I enjoy doing live in front of a class.
The killer was the final lesson, when I demonstrated our backup-restore tool, and it broke the server.
I need a weekend.
There's a rumor they may send me to India to teach this class again.
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