MindSpinner

What Works

Tonight I got my oil changed at the Express Lube downtown. Fifteen minutes flat. Beautiful.

What Doesn’t (#1)

Today I was handed 50 pencils to sharpen for tomorrow’s state testing. This will take a little time. It’s not as if I don’t have another thing or two (or 50) to do. But unsharpened pencils are cheaper than sharpened ones, right? We teachers are on a salary, and our job description is infinitely extensible, so buy us unsharpened pencils and $5 pencil sharpeners and set us to work. If we are making more than fifteen copies, we are supposed to use the Riso machine instead of the photocopier. The Riso takes two or three times as long if we are copying front and back, as we always are, to save paper, but it’s cheaper, and time spent collating handouts apparently doesn’t count. But the joke is, I have only so many hours a week I can devote to this job or any other, so if I spend those hours sharpening pencils and collating handouts by hand (my textbooks being older than my students), I have not so much time to do pesky little tasks like grade papers or plan well-thought out lessons.

What Doesn’t (#2)

My laptop doesn’t. Apparently, the hard drive is a goner, and with it 1 GB of lovely pictures from Shaker Village and the wildflower trail there. The machine should be resurrected and returned to me by the end of the week, but my data is toast. From now on, I burn a DVD every time I take pictures and before I delete photos from my camera, even if my computer is brand new, as indeed it is. The good news is that next spring I’ll just have to go back to Shaker Village for my birthday and take all those gorgeous pictures all over again.