Some days it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps...

There is nothing quite so frustrating as preparing for a lesson, as fully as you can, only to discover that there was something that you hadn't thought of that knocks the entire lesson for six.

On Tuesday, we were offered the chance to muse upon this after the lack of a DVD player, and then the lack of speakers, on a PC, totally threw out the plans of our ITT trainer, despite their being the best-laid they could be.

Today, it was the computers again (why is it always the electrical equipment that lets us down?), only this time, I discovered fifteen minutes into a class on Blogs that the college internet policy for students won't let them access any online journal sites. And yet last year, they were able to do this just fine.

It may well be that the person who did the Scheme of Work last year neglected to note that they had had to obtain a particular permission for it, but whatever the reason, it left me standing in a class of 15 people all staring at a white page with a swirly college logo announcing "Access denied". This problem was exacerbated by the fact that the control of ESOL students over the realm of IT is tenuous at best, and any error message (or anything they THINK is an error message) will confuse them beyond measure. Take the fact that the system now appears to want to use Microsoft Wordmail, but for some reason there are a whole slew of macros to be disabled. I waste enormous amounts of class time (and I say enormous because the time spent on this WILL add up by the end of the year) instructing student after student on how to get rid of the dialogue boxes that appear, in order for them to be able to use the program they need to, and it happens for no reason I can discern.

Let us also add into this cocktail of stress the fact that almost all of the students had totally forgotten how to open their e-mail accounts.

And then let's pour in a dash of the following conversation:
Me: Look at the mouse.
Student: (looking at the PC screen) Yes.
Me: No, look at the mouse.
Student: (looks briefly at the mouse and then looks back at the screen). Yes.
Me: No, keep looking at the mouse, look at the two buttons...

This is a class who are using e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, Powerpoint- some challenging things- and yet they haven't done the basic thing of right and left mouse buttons.

As you can probably imagine, all of this, and the repeated need to explain the same thing over and over, led to me finishing the lesson about ready to head to the nearest bar and set up a private tab for gin and juice.

But I'm veering off the point, which is that as a professional, I should have had a back-up plan, but I relied on past performance as an indicator of future performance, and got burned. Future IT lessons need to take into account the fact that the computer system can, and will, play merry hell with what I have planned- my internet lessons, in particular, need to have a back-up plan if the internet isn't connected, or sites are banned.

I guess the upside of this horror of a lesson was that I learned something valuable myself- you can't prepare for everything, but you should, as a professional teacher, be ready for as many eventualities as you can- and one of the main ones to be ready for is The College Computers/DVDs/Videos/TVs/Other Electrical Equipment can, and will, let you down.