Oh, No! What Am I Going to Do?

The power cord to my laptop doesn’t work any more. It will take at least a week to get a new one. This is the computer I take from school to school and contains all my most important documents, like attendance rosters, Finale and Sibelius files, etc., not to mention my access to the internet. As of today, the battery icon tells me I have about an hour of juice left.

Whenever I run into technological pitfalls like this, I am unimpressed with my own fatalistic reaction. “How can I do my job without my computer?” Then, after about 20 minutes of jiggling the power cord in futility, it dawns on me that my job is not about that computer; it is about, well, teaching and influencing children.

If you’re like me (and by the very fact that you’re sitting there reading a blog instead of mountain climbing or scuba diving, you might be a little like me), you’re instinctively drawn to your computer to “get work done.” Not having a working computer at school always forces me to consider all the work I can get done without it. And almost always, I realize that some of the most important work doesn’t really involve the computer as much as I believe.