Just a little reboot…

I have a love/hate relationship with technology. I imagine many people these days have the same. I love the convenience, the speed, the breadth of knowledge, the ways to connect, and for many kids- a form of engagement. All is well until I get a headache from too much screen time or my fingers hurt from typing. The worst is when it just doesn’t work. The text won’t send, the phone never rang, the site won’t load- you name it, technology will fail you at some point at any given time. The worst is when you were planning on it working. You needed that 20 minutes to prep the next part of your day and the kids needed the practice to demonstrate growth for your evaluation, but the application you need is running perfectly fine for half of your students and not for the other half. No reason- just not running. You think those kids just wait patiently until the screen eventually loads? Of course not. They are all following you to show you that it is not working or calling out to let you know (along with the other half calling out to inform you that theirs is working just fine- not all at once though, in succession, so it’s just a constant stream of noise). You didn’t need them to tell you anything because you could see on your screen that half were on and half were not. You know what the help desk will say first, “did you restart the computer?”. Don’t you always hear that? It’s like an IT code- ask if you gave it a good old reboot before you really look into the issue. I get it- I married an IT guy, I know half the time they have no clue why it randomly stopped working because there usually isn’t a logical explanation or a clear set of steps to take to avoid it. But rebooting does the trick more than half the time. (Don’t ask for help when it doesn’t work because the next suggestion is try again in a few minutes which any teacher will tell you that in a few minutes that portion of our day is over and now we just wasted our time, didn’t fix the problem for the future and potentially have some pretty disappointed kids let alone that evaluation data cannot write itself!) Sometimes I wish I could just reboot. Just say to someone- you know, this isn’t working for me, let me just go reboot, refresh, recharge, and I’ll get back to you and see if I decide to let it work. What would you do if you could get just a little reboot?