Starting Up

This has been quite the week. Monday and Tuesday were warmup days at school. Plenty of meetings but also prep time. We had a chance to catch up with colleagues and plan some things out for the year. There were also some nice bonuses planned in, like luxurious lunches, wine tasting, and a comedy group that came from England.

Everything, of course, changed on Wednesday when the students invaded. I had a light schedule to start out and my first lessons with the second year students went well. I am not a mentor and all of my first year students had time with their mentors, or with their new laptops. We set up a program with the help of an outside firm to guide them through the use of their MacBooks and Google. The only problem was that the Internet was rather skittish, crashing entirely on Friday.

Teachers were rather at a loss for what to do with the kids, as the whole program was Internet based, but I taught them a bit about chess. It was quite nice - starting out with a story from the Middle Ages and introducing all the characters. Then they were partnered up and they could play against each other with a laptop - no Internet needed. The kids had a great time. I guess this is no longer VMBO...what a relief!

We also need to be able to hook up our MacBooks to the projectors in the classrooms - I spent a few hours this week trying to figure out how. There is a program we can use to do this through the network wirelessly, but then we depend on the classroom PC's and Internet to be working which is never wise. Apple TV is the logical choice, but network permissions don't allow it, so we need to kick it old school with wires.

The plan was to give each teacher the connecting cable and they would need to unplug the PC connection, hook up the Mac, and replace the PC after the lesson. We discovered two problems with this. First, they would damage the PC's video card quickly and probably do things wrong as the setup is not the same in all classrooms. Second, on most, but not all of the beamers I tried the Macbook froze up.

This was a big mystery until we got some help from one of the Interns that a teacher brought in to help with Macbook problems - the school's IT department won't deal with anything but PC's. As it turns out, when the power cable is not plugged in, the MacBook is running at about 75% - not enough juice to configure its output properly to some of the beamers. So now all the classrooms will need power outlets as well so teachers can have their machines plugged in. We should get everything wired in so that they don't need to carry around an adapter cable, but we shall see if that happens.

This week was rather eventful at home as well. We rode to Delftshaven to pick up a vintage West German table saw for 15 Euros - in the directions it says that it can 'only be operated by a male of at least 17 years'. I guess Naomi will have to keep her distance. The saw did not have a table with it, so I figured I should build one. We picked a table top out of the dumpster recently and found some nice legs before, so I put it together one hot and sunny afternoon. Now we can eat and work outside much more easily...all that Maple flooring downstairs might need to be turned into something else...

Yesterday we went to pick up a dishwasher - the small kind that sits on a countertop. Today I will try to get it installed. Hopefully that won't be too much of a pain...

The new workbench.