In Which I Consider What I am Doing as a Peace Corps Volunteer

All my students have left to do their student teaching at secondary schools around the country.  I would probably be more productive had I not been robbed last week and lost my laptop and spent a certain amount of time being angsty and mopey and all social with other volunteers in the course of which I discovered a really cheap spa, and now my feet are clean for the first time since I began service, and this is a very odd feeling.  But at some point, I will get myself together and think about doing some lab maintenance and make some nice posters about the history of computers and the difference between left and right clicking.   I also need to figure out how to be a better teacher.

Some things I actually do really well.  Example: instead of lecturing on network components, I took my students on a field trip to the server room to show them our network stuff.  Several other teachers have remarked on what a good idea this is and started doing the same thing.

I also have to give each of my classes one lecture a week on pedagogy.  Were I to follow the syllabus on this,  I would do nothing but lecture on the format of lesson plans.  This is the same for every subject, and I refuse to be the fifth teacher in a row to make the students draw precisely layed out charts of lessons so I do things like force them into a discussion of corporal discipline (I got them to disagree with me!)  or, on one memorable occasion, walk into the classroom and announce without warning that they
would now be practicing teaching, and "you there, you have 5 minutes to teach the class on a subject of your choice, here's some chalk, go."  I even managed to get them to give reasonable feedback to each other on that one.   And the class monitor (one student who has some special job that I don't fully know what it is) ran after me as I left the classroom and asked for some chalk so they could continue to practice.   I'm very proud of that lesson, for all that it only happened because I had a sore throat that day.

But I desperately need to actually structure my lab classes.  I have about 60 students per class, and this is impossible for one person to run alone.  I need to have a system in which the students who get it more become teacherlets and assist the students who get it less.

Also, I so don't spend enough time doing lab maintenance.  I'm the type of teacher who goes home at the end of the workday, takes a cold shower, and then lies down and reads for a while, works out, makes dinner and goes to bed.  Teaching is tiring, it's about 90F most days, feeding myself and keeping my house as not a cesspit of my own filth is tiring, but I still need to make time to go through the lab, make sure the connections are really connected, and delete and remake the generic student accounts because the students do bizarre things to their accounts like delete most of the items in the menus and create tons of new folders.  Fine, practice, whatever, but it makes things difficult for the next student.

I also need to make some nice diagrams on how to keep the network connected for the teachers.  I had this, but it was on my laptop, and not backed up.