Fall Break ends with a Jolt...or not.

This morning I walk into my room after a delicious week off, and start getting geared up for the day. Turn on the computer, check mail, print out a homework helper sheet, write classwork and homework on the board...and realize that I haven't heard the printer hum.

So, I go over, check the printer and it's not on. Weird. I could have sworn I turned it on. I flip the on button again. Nothing. And then I notice that my phone is not on, and there's no power to my hub. It appears that everything on one side of the room has no power, whereas everything in the rest of the room is fine. However, the items without power include my LCD projector and the sound system I use with my microphone.

This is not a good way to start a Monday, let alone a Monday after break.

I go up and inform The Secretary and The Head Janitor of the problem. Pretty soon Mr. Social Studies comes in and notices that he's lacking power in parts of his room as well. This was followed a short while later by Miss Reading who has the same lack of power.

Great.

Technology is awesome, but when there's no power, it's time to punt. Mr. Social Studies got creative with extension cords. I figured I could survive the day without dangling wires all over the place, so instead of having the kids listen to the audio CD of the book for the chapter we are working on, I read to them, and they did their post-it notes on the reading. After that was finished, we had a foldable to do on levels of organization (cells, tissues, organs, etc) which posed some challenges as the document reader wasn't working. However, my big screw up the last day before break when I made too many copies of the foldable helper sheets for my special ed kids turned out to be a blessing. I had enough copies that each table got two and they could copy the notes from the helper sheets, rather than from the screen as I walked them through the topic and did the foldable.

Fortunately, they got The District Electricians in rather quickly. The drawback is they walk into the room while you're teaching and are infinitely more interesting than anything I could possibly be doing. Besides, their cell phones kept going off - loudly - which got the kids even more intrigued. They were a bit disappointed that the ringing belonged to an adult's cell phone, and not one of their classmates, which would have meant a mandatory seizure and write-up.

The problem was fixed, thankfully, by the beginning of third period. Apparently, someone in another classroom down the hall had jammed something into a socket and it shorted out the entire wall. It's a wonder we didn't burn down the building.

So can any of you guess what happened later this day, after I got home and was getting supper ready?

Yup, power outage. For an hour and a half.

Wonderful.