When All Else Fails...Punt

I'm the first to admit that I really enjoy, and utilize heavily, all the technology in my room.  I know some teachers do a lot of PowerPoints (I don't) and they love that, but my favorite is my document reader.  It's amazing what you can do with that thing.  I've dissected a flower on there, zoomed in to look at the different parts, and gosh knows what else.  It's easy and convenient to slap up an example of something and work through it so the kids can see what's going on (talk about modeling).  I probably use that thing more than anything else in my room.

So, when it blinked on and off orange three times and then went off completely IN THE MIDDLE OF A LESSON on Friday I knew I was in for an interesting afternoon.  No matter what I tried to do, it would not come back on.  Tested wires, turned things on and off, rebooted my ancient computer.  No luck.

Darn.

My lesson was about doing formulas for speed, distance and time.  Let's be honest, our kids feel that they can't do math without a calculator and really have no clue what they are doing when they press buttons on the stupid things.  So this was one lesson where they really needed to see examples.  Except now they weren't going to see them.

So, I grabbed the bottle of white board cleaner, my cleaning mitt, a basket of markers and proceeded to do the lesson by moving from the three little (and I mean little) white boards scattered across the room.  I'd write some notes and examples on one board, explain it, the kids would work on it, and I'd move to another board and repeat.

I forgot how short I am compared to these boards.  And I was having to write REALLY BIG because it seems that half my kids can't see anything if it's not in really big letters.

Thank goodness we only had two periods left.  By the end of the day a tech guy had shown up, found a problem with a wire in the wall, and fixed it.  Yeah.

What a way to kick off fall break, eh?