My first IT job was at a school district. Elementary school.
I wasn’t in charge of kids, per se, but sometimes I was surrounded by kids and no other staff.
We had a power outage, it was between periods, kids everywhere. I was making my way to the network closet to do my fucking job.
Suddenly, I had like a hundred kids looking to me for guidance. Some questions I could answer. What happened? We lost power. What should we do? Well fuck man, I dunno. So I stood in the hall to monitor as best I could (you know, make sure they didn’t kill each other) and announced that they needed to go to their next location.
Kids started filing around each other and me, heading where they knew they needed to (late in the school year) except one kid.
I knew this kid. He was special needs. He didn’t know where he needed to go. Ok, cool. Well, when he was a classroom disturbance, because I couldn’t set boundaries, I let him “help” me.
Honestly, this kid was probably just autistic though I never saw paperwork. He was decent with computers. I put him in my lab and had him imaging machines for me. He loved it, and I’d like to think he may wind up with a career because of it. I had him “help” me a lot more throughout the year. He replaced some hardware even!
Anyways, while he was imaging, I called his collective of teachers and figured out where he needed to go. He wanted to watch a machine finish imaging (PXE boot, it was a time bar) and then got him to his next class.
As I relate this, I really miss working in an elementary school. The kids are so curious about everything. I only worked there a year, I received an offer that literally doubled my take home pay. Now I’ve been corporate and medical IT and I hate it. Ah well, capitalism is a bitch.
From past experience, and I mean, before proton…
You need to know that learning is part of the fun. Playing the games themselves isn’t the fun part. Getting them running is.