Back to School, YouTube Videos & Shadow Puppets

Like most teachers on the planet--or at least in these parts--I spent last week frantically trying to organize my room and plan for the upcoming school year in the moments provided between attending meetings, learning how to bond with my fellow teacheroos and setting goals.

While at these meetings, we got to watch several nifty little PowerPoints along with nifty little YouTube videos. Don’t you just love those videos? I do.

Jeez, I’d love to show nifty little YouTube videos to help keep my kiddos engaged, but sadly I do not have the keys to enter the YouTube video kingdom where all is nifty and fan-tab-u-lous.

No Siree, not me.

Try as I might, St. Bernard, our school’s Internet gatekeeper, blocks me. No YouTube video kingdom keys for me. No Siree. I couldn’t watch Mr. Teacher’s rather fab-u-lous rendition of Darth Vader explaining the Pythagorean Theorem on YouTube no matter how hard I try.

Nope. No can do. And if you’re reading this from your school, you probably can’t go there either.

And, I’m sad to report that I can’t show an interesting video by that University of Virginia professor to my newly bonded teacheroo friends to discuss how the professor basically cans everything I’ve ever been told about learning styles when he proclaims “Learning Styles Don’t Exist.”

Try accessing that at your school. Nuh-uh. Sorry. No can do. The watcher of all that is Internet will not allow access.

So much for the free flow of ideas. I’m down to a trickle here. I bet you are too. It’s enough to make you think you’re in China. Hey, maybe Chinese spies created Internet blockers.

Now, I could request access from my tech guy buddies, but with our tech guys opening up two campuses and troubleshooting all the computer scheduling problems etc. that surface at the start of the school year, I didn’t because (1) I really, really do like our tech guys and I didn’t want to bother them and add to their stress, and (2) I know this request isn’t that important so it probably stands as much of a chance (at this point in time) as this guy.

So in the meantime until things settle down, I guess shadow puppets will have to suffice.


And if you don’t think I’ll do that, well then my friends, you don’t know me well at all.