OJT

 I became a computer teacher because I showed up at a time when teaching technology to children seemed like a forward- thinking idea. My credentials at that time consisted of spending a few years wrestling with the machines that checked out tapes and VCRs at the video store where I worked. That, and a few weeks under the tutelage of a very wise family friend who took it upon himself to prepare me for a life in the late twentieth century that was starting to fill up with job opportunities that required a certain amount of tech acumen. I learned about C prompts and DOS and what was happening behind those newfangled "wordprocessors." My first regular experience typing prose into a computer was done through the auspices of Wordstar. I was careful to save all my work to the five inch floppy disc latched into the slot in the front of the machine.

After a stint in the furniture installation business where my contact with computers was primarily unplugging them so that I could raise or lower the workstations for IBM employees, I spent a few years lugging books around a warehouse where our inventory was meticulously inventoried via handy dandy barcodes, a new frontier in obscuring valuable information from end-users. It was just a hop skip and a few years between that and the moment where these bits of contact with what would become my job title brought me to The Computer Lab at Horace Mann. 

The first thing I got to do when I arrived was to untangle the mess of cables and more cables that connected a bunch of Mac LCIIs to dot matrix printers. And once I got all these little plastic boxes hooked up and humming, I invited groups of kids in to practice making blocky scribbles with KidPix and try their hand at avoiding dysentary on the Oregon Trail. 

I learned a lot on the job. One of the first tasks that landed in my lap was lashing a group of IBM 486 machines together with SCSI cables to push a ghost image onto them to make them "Internet Ready." I accomplished this by carefully following the pages of detailed instructions that were printed on someone else's dot matrix printer and I can only now remember the experience as a near-miss. 

It wasn't until we approached the turn of the century that a benefactor appeared to ask me what it would take to fill a room with "Internet Ready" PCs that would allow our students to reach out into the vast sea of information that was only a frontier not unlike the Oregon Trail at that point. He put together funding that became what he had suggested. And I figured out how to put them together. 

I don't play Oregon Trail with my kids anymore. I spend more time trying to scare them away from using the Internet when they aren't supposed to. We don't use floppy discs. Or CD-ROMs. We access the cloud in nonchalant ways that make me miss that blinking cursor in the upper right hand corner of the screen. The decades that have passed since I showed up ready to learn how to teach computers.