Saving Face

Today the POL advertisements were made, and one of them was ICT coordinator. Such is the legend of my incompetence, people in my office have suggested, facetiously, that I go for it. You get almost zero teaching time, to facilitate working in classrooms with teachers on their ICT.

Even when being facetious, such jokes only make me aware of how useless I'd be in such a position, and I want to book my flight no Namibia urgently.

I'd be better off teaching specialist maths. Seriously.

Oh crap - so that's two things I'm useless at.

I don't like being bad at things. It means there are too many opportunities for me to lose face. In English, when people ask me a question, even if I don't know what the answer is I can usually take a stab and it usually turns out to be right. Just ask me to hook the laptop to the projector and the following can go wrong in the space of 15 literal seconds:

1. The projector won't relay the picture to the board
2. The speakers aren't working
3. The speakers are working but it's not loud enough and no matter what I do this cannot be rectified
4. The speakers are working, but the picture isn't so we can hear everything but see nothing and the students won't stop screaming at me that I'm ruining it because they can hear what's going on but can't see it and now they know how it's all going to end but they haven't seen it and come on miss turn it off quickly turn it off!!!! *Please make them stop*
5. The DVD won't play on my laptop
6. The projector WILL relay the picture on the board, and I've left something embarrassing on the desktop
7. I'm not even sure if I've used the word desktop in the right context
8. The DVD is in French and I CANNOT get the subtitles to work even though I did select them
9. I may have broken the volume nob from frantically trying to force the sound to get louder *why won't you work dammnit frickkety frick frick frick!*
10. I just wasted nearly 40 minutes of teaching time. The End. And now my year 12s think I'm not compentent enough to actually be a teacher and when I pass them in the corridor I can hear their thoughts: she is the most incompetent teacher in the world.

Not really in the world, children. When I move to Namibia and they don't have ICT, then I will be the very best!