I'll give you a synopsis of my life in case you haven't heard. I'm teaching high-school in C_ now. It's still somewhat conservative, but it's not so bad as B__. Women even take welding classes here, although AFAIK the homosexual population is... none. But that's not as unlikely as it sounds, since the town's population is around 800. But it's nice, I get to fix computers and teach people how to use computers, but not too much of either. I only teach 5 classes, with a max of 22 students, and a mean of 13.
I'm taking classes on the weekend at the U____, so that I'll eventually get my credential, so I'm staying real busy.
The only major issue I have here is that I have no idea who setup our network before I got here, or what exactly they thought they were doing. And having never administered anything before, it's a little intimidating to just rip stuff out when no-one knows what it's there for. I've eliminated 3 servers, leaving 4, and no-one noticed the loss, so obviously those machines weren't serving anything; they will become *NIX boxen.
Yes, everything here is Windows. The servers are all win2000, the highschool desktops are split between winXP and win2000, and most of the elementary school is win98.
Oh, and there's only one domain controller, at the high school, that controls all accounts on the network for both the HS and the ES. This means that a couple weeks ago when the HS had a power-outage, the elementary school experienced a network-outage.
I'd like to fix that by setting up an active directory whereby each school is managed locally. I have no idea how to go about that, so I'm not gonna risk breaking a functional network till I do.
Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, that's only a minor irritation. A major irritation is that our email is via T_. They use First Class for their email, and for some assuredly ungodly amount of money they provide us a little over a hundred email addresses @t__. Students get a c001 to c100 account, which is major SPAM-bait since they don't change from year-to-year, and teachers get basic addresses - eg. d@t.
We own c___.org (theoretically) and we have a t1 line. I'd like to setup our own email server so that students and teachers have one login and password for both the network and for their email. I wish my high-school had provided email, a stable professional-looking address is a very valuable resource for anyone wishing to get a job/go to college/lookup friends who graduated 5 years ago. So I plan to provide that, it's less than 100 accounts plus 30 new accounts a year. But of course, I have no idea how.
Oh, if you want to rip your hair out in frustration, you could visit http://s____/~____/ I can't recommend it though. I have a promising freshman writing HTML for a whole new site, and once she's got a decent mock-up I plan to obliterate that abomination. Not that the lady who wrote it isn't a wonderful person, and an excellent 4th grade teacher. I'm not decided whether to host c.org here and redirect that address to it, or to just redirect c.org to that site and then update that one. It won't be a major bandwidth hog, that I know. Most our students don't have internet access at home.
Anyrate, thats the exciting bits computer-wise, I think. any suggestions are of course welcome.
Ozzyemm is not working at the moment, which is tricky since without a credential I'm earning about $7000 less than a teacher normally does, which is basically nothing. So it's lucky the cost of living in this town is nothing, due to lack of theatres, restaurants, cinemas... yeah, lucky. :)
I really appreciate the isolation though, feels much more like Africa. Frankly, cities exhaust the heck out of me.
I can walk to work here.
Ozzyemm's mom was so impressed with C that she volunteered to let D live up here. And since he's not been doing well in school, we took him. He's at C____ Elementary now, and he goes home to his mom on the weekends. So I'm a de facto dad now. Just what I always wanted, a 12 year old with problems depending on me to be stable and supportive and what-not. I'm doubtful that I could raise my own children well, let alone fix other people's mistakes. Still and all, he's a good kid and we're making it work.
Did you know that being a math teachers shortens your patience for helping others with their homework immeasurably?
I'm teaching one math class, because with only 88 students total, they didn't feel that computing alone is enough work.