I made a promise several months ago, before I had a baby, drove a car, moved house… that kind of thing. I’ve already declared my intent to resign from my current job (the travel is unsustainable) and now I have a shelf full of notes, clippings, experiments, tips and tricks from my work as school tech for the past eight years.
I’ll be dropping some things on here, some on Techknow and sending some to another professional in the same field that I promised a properly written up collection to of everything I’ve learned on-the-job that you don’t pick up in handbooks and formal training.
Not that the formal training for school techs is readily available, or available at all for some, but there are several good people, better than me, working on that problem as we speak.
For my first tip, purely off the top of my head – If you’re going to be a school tech, GET A DIARY! One of those with plenty of room for each day. The best diary I ever had was a spiral bound, A4, hard-backed lined notebook. The first page of each double spread was a notepage for the whole week, and the second was divided into Monday-Weekend.
Because there will be “weekend” tasks, believe me.
The back of the book had a yearly schedule written in; the front had a phone book. Practicals were written in by title, with a lab, teacher name and time. The practicals that required preparation prior to the day were split into tasks and written in on the day they needed to be done.
Even if you are lucky enough to work in a school lab with several techs, one common, master schedule is a must, otherwise chaos will be more your watchword. It also gives you a back up when you have to say “no”.
No, I can’t add your last-minute practical to my schedule, else I’ll be running round so fast my feet’ll catch fire!
