(mailed and posted)

To turn to the more substantial aspects of your report ...

 1) Yes, exactly as you note, that lab has been a sorry story for quite a while, despite CUIP full-crew fixup visits and various school plans for keeping it in shape.  Ms. Herron's decision to keep it generally locked makes sense; maybe there's still time this year to implement a teacher check-out system.

  BTW, if at some point it looks to you like a couple mice, a couple keyboards, or even an extra ethernet hub could improve the functioning of the lab enough to improve the atmosphere, we do have such items available.

  Maybe next year they really will bring in a bunch of new Tech-XL machines.  

2) It's disappointing that the behavioral problems you got immersed in were with a laptop cart session, not even the cruddy desktop lab! 

   As Shaz discussed at the NSP/CUIP meeting earlier this quarter, if it's your feeling a teacher is letting a class run wild, Shaz and Sara can find non-confrontational ways of injecting some feedback at an appropriate level.  

  That's a really interesting observation about the vicious cycle of the tech problems and the behavioral problems.  Do you think it would tamp down that pattern to have a couple more adults on hand, both to troubleshoot the signon issues but covertly also to stare down the rambunctious students?

It's great that you're bearing up with it cheerfully, it seems!

Thanks a lot,


  ==Mitch