Excuses

“Oh, I don’t really check my email.”

Whenever I hear this, I despair. On the last occasion, had I not been in my happy place at the time (due to just having been given a load of extra money in my budget), I would have killed the offender where she stood. I had a 7-year old Toshiba laptop in my hand at the time, and it would have died a glorious and honourable death being used to inflict blunt force trauma.

Right now there is an ongoing issue with email in the school. Chiefly, that the provision is a bit shit. It’s hosted off-site, and one can access it in one of two irritating ways:

1. Login to webmail with a username that is different from the school network login, and be logged out automatically after 15 minutes, or
2. manually configure Outlook to collect email via POP3.

Neither of these are convenient for end users, and are sufficiently inconvenient that a large proportion of the staff simply go weeks (or even months) at a time without checking their email, much to the irritation of senior staff who are desperately trying to use email more widely throughout the school.

In the next few months, the email provision will be brought on-site and Outlook will be automatically configured for everyone. After that, there will be no excuse, and the killings will begin in earnest.

Proofreading

A few years ago, I had to do some proofreading for the school.

The material was the sixth form tutor reports that were about to be issued from our electronic reporting system for the first time. You might ask why I was proofreading them, and well you might. The teachers writing them had been asked to proofread each others, but had refused as “proofreading was not part of their job”. The position was that their own reports were perfect, so why should they have their time wasted proofreading someone else’s?

Bond’s opinion, to this very day, is that reports should be issued mistakes and all, so that the individual teachers who make the mistakes will be exposed for the illiterate morons they are. My opinion was that management should have told the teachers concerned to shut up and do their jobs. However, the school’s management, and the Head in particular, were unwilling to issue a diktat, but keen for the school not to look like it was staffed by nincompoops. This little dispute happened quite close to the deadline, so, one evening, I found myself proofreading.

Prudence

If you are a teacher who has just emailed us to ask if you can have your storage quota extended because you’ve run out of space, might I suggest that it would be prudent to first ensure you are not using over a quarter of your existing quota in folders named the following?

• Guns N’ Roses
• Bruce Springsteen
• Kanye West
• Coldplay
• Keane

If you do not check this in advance, might I suggest that you might find your request denied?

P.S. It also helps if the last time you emptied the Recycle Bin was not in 2007.

Skivers

I was returning a computer to our language lab last week, fresh from having one of its fans replaced, when I was informed of a new problem by one of the languages teachers. One the of the computers was “not working”.

I quickly discovered the root cause. It was turned off.

“Oh, trust the boys to not have thought of that!” came the bemused reply from the teacher.

Ignoring the fact that she had herself failed to think of it, I pointed out that the students almost certainly did think of that, but if they had tried turning it on they would not have been able to avoid work by pretending the computer was broken.

Samsung NC-10: just not tough enough for school

So far, we have 40 Samsung NC-10 netbooks deployed in the school; some running Vista, and some running the Windows 7 RC. They’ve all been upgraded to 2GB of RAM and are joined to the domain. They are running pretty well, but in the last week we’ve been finding some problems.

Basically, these machines are just not bloody tough enough. We’ve previously used nothing but Dell laptops, and despite our relatively well-behaved students, they do take a bit of a bashing. After only a month, the Samsungs are not faring well, and 3 are already out of action.

Power

This week, the History department learned that in order for a power supply to work, it has to be plugged in both to the power socket on the wall, AND to the socket on the back of the laptop.

Some things never change

Once again, a teacher who came on site for a 10-minute visit implied that we are doing naff all this week and getting paid for it, when in fact we are run ragged, as is usual for half-term.

This despite the fact that she actually is getting paid for doing naff all this week.

It’s not your computer

Not long ago, I was faced at another school I support with a situation where a teacher who had recently gone on maternity leave had to be pressured by management to return their laptop while they were away, so that their substitute had a laptop to use.

The ICT co-ordinator bemoaned the ignorant excuses they gave: “I don’t want people looking at my personal email or files!” This was someone who didn’t really understand that if you log on with a different account, you get different files and settings. This explanation had to be put to the teacher several times before she finally relented and brought the laptop in.

I listened and agreed with all of the ICT co-ordinator’s complaints, before pointing out that they need not have had the discussion at all. Management only needed to say one thing.

“This laptop is not yours. It is the school’s. We decide who uses it.”

Platitudes are relevant in certain situations, but the fact is, teachers in many schools seem to think that the laptop they are loaned is a perk of the job. It isn’t. If it was, it would be a taxable benefit. So, until they start paying tax on ‘their’ laptop, they can shut their cake-hole and comply with any request the school makes regarding that equipment’s use.

Time after time

There is a teacher in the school who has asked me on 5 separate occasions to install a particular piece of software ASAP on a computer because she expected it to be there already and couldn’t find it when she needed it.

Each time it is a different computer. Each time, the software is already installed, complete with a shortcut in the same place on the Start Menu as on every other computer.

I might be able to understand this if a) the shortcut was not in an obvious place, and b) this had only happened once or twice, but after 5 times of the shortcut being in a place that everyone else in the department has no trouble finding, I’m starting to wonder if she has genuine memory problems, or if she is just an idiot.

Cheeky

I had a request from a teacher this morning to increase her quota on the storage server as she had hit her limit, resulting in problems with saving new documents.

Our standard procedure when this happens is to have a quick check over what is taking up all the space to see if there is redundant data that could be removed. I found that more than half her quota was being used by a set of photos and videos from the previous year, and suggested a clear-out would solve the problem.

I then got a message in return:

“Ok, but I have a 5 period day today. Can you do anything to help very short term?”

I suggested that I could delete some of the nearly 400MB of MP3s in her ‘My Music’ folder, and assumed she would get the hint. Imagine my surprise when I instead received this utterly serious reply:

“No I need them for the school musical.”

Oh yes. Yes, I’m sure you need Shakira for the school musical. Request denied.