Thursday, May 9, 2013

Teacher "Appreciation" - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher

Teacher "Appreciation" - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher:


Teacher "Appreciation"

It's 1993, at the Michigan Teacher of the Year celebration in Lansing, and I have just been awarded a lovely parting gift: a Digital 286 computer. It sits on a table in the front of the ballroom, beige and boxy, the 12-inch monitor scrolling "Nancy Flanagan, Michigan Teacher of the Year" in bright pink letters. I am thrilled. My first computer!
The program lists the Lansing business that donated the computer to the TOY program, and their representative stood up for a round of grateful applause at the banquet. As I am unplugging the CPU to take the computer home, I notice that it's scratched and dented a bit. There doesn't seem to be a printer, either. The woman whose company contributed the computer appears at my elbow and tells me that their entire office was just outfitted with brand-new 386 models, so they didn't need the old ones--and then asks for the electrical cord. "We can still use that!" she says brightly.
I have just been given a hand-me-down business computer with no printer or cord. Congratulations!
But--I am still thrilled, although it's harder to get the right cord than you might think, and it takes several more paychecks before I can scrape together the cash to buy a dot-matrix printer. Only a couple of teachers in my building have their own computers, and I am geeked about the cool materials I can now produce--although in 1993 teachers were not yet allowed to use the Xerox machine to reproduce documents. That was reserved for