Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a gangster – wait a minute, that’s not right. Let’s try this again.
Ever since I was in elementary school I’ve wanted to be a K12 Technology Professional. I was that kid who lost his classwork because Microsoft Word crashed (I’m talking way before the days of automatic drafts or documents in the cloud!).
It was miserable.
I think about that moment and the way it made me feel to have no idea how to work this new technology, to be powerless. For a little know-it-all, that was the catalyst.
From that moment, I realized that the Technology person was the one I needed to talk to, because nobody I knew could help. At this point at the small school I went to, the tech person only came once or twice a week (and often after school hours). This is a departure from the position I just left, where I was a full-time 12-month contracted employee with an open-door policy.
I digress…
Considering I couldn’t get in contact with the tech person, I started to look closer at their handiwork. I would try things, and then read about even more things to try in order to see what I could do. Proxies, for example, were exotic because it got you around the content filter and onto whatever website you wanted while at school. (They’re also dangerous, if you’re reading this and are curious to try them.)
In my limited Internet time on the family computer in the evenings, I could research topics that came to mind, but Google hadn’t come out yet; so, I found myself in various tech communities (of various reputations) where I would learn programming and share scripts online. While there were countless, I can remember a simple script I borrowed and modified that opened and closed the CD tray at random.
As the years went on, I experienced a variety of new things and had my head buried in books and PC magazines to learn new things. The whole time, my parents lamented the fact that I would rather spend all my time on that computer instead of trying to get straight A’s in school.
I regret nothing.
I did countless small jobs and even interned at a local computer repair shop. Whenever I sat down to run the numbers, though, I didn’t see how I would be able to survive off of PC cleanings and the labor markup from building computers. No, I would have to go much, much deeper if I wanted to make a good living in the technology field.
Moving Forward
Fast forward to 2017 and at this point I have been a K12 Technology Professional for about a year now. I can remember staring at a rackmount server that was setting in the keyboard tray of a computer desk running just one virtual machine. Right below it was a highly overpowered tower server I’d gotten suckered into buying.
I was lost. Out of my depth. Imposter Syndrome kicked in and I started having nightmarish realizations that I was probably hired because I said I knew how to use Linux and that I had actually bitten off way more than I could chew.
Then that familiar catalyst started to burn bright once more, there was so much in this district that didn’t feel right technology-wise, but I just didn’t know! Now that I knew I didn’t know, I knew what I had to do.
I started plotting and researching, and eventually came to the conclusion that it didn’t make sense for the flow of traffic to go to an unnecessary building when it could all go to where the demarcation point was located, and therefore cut down on the amount of downtime we would have. I moved the servers and so began the journey I called the “5-9 Uptime Plan” or 99.999% uptime, within reason.
With that newfound obsession in focus, I would then go on to document switches and devices and make maps and eventually find a way to have tech support help me hack bridges into my awful content filter (it was running Debian Linux on a Dell R420) so that I could finally create VLANs to help limit the random network loops where a teacher plugged a device into itself and destroyed the entire learning environment until it was discovered. Except, I could only have about four.
It was something. A little victory.
Eventually, I would hack together a solution where a router would send staff and student traffic to the content filter, and all server traffic would go straight out to the Internet. This was because the content filter would crash. This way, I was able to monitor my servers from home, instead of thinking the entire district was melting down. Not to mention, I routed my workstation traffic through that router directly so I wasn’t dead in the water when that garbage ultimately went up in a dumpster fire.
In the following years, I set up monitoring, graphed network traffic, etc. I configured countless Linux and Windows servers – one after another, as I found myself needing them.
Year over year, improvements would come. Even during the middle of the school day. I used to break the network 5-10 seconds at a time to test network policies and whatnot in order to fully configure implicit deny rules without too many people complaining. For what it’s worth, I don’t ever recommend doing this. I was playing with fire because I couldn’t stand the state of the network. Either that, or I am effectively fueled by chaos.
Then, 2020 happened. By mid-March I was tasked with trying to find as many Chromebooks as I could as quickly as possible to give to as many grades as I had devices before we would ultimately begin our summer vacation. It was such a crisis, and a daunting task placed before a single technology person, but you do the best you can.
Looking Back
As I look back at K12 Technology Life in the rearview, I am grateful for the people I have met and have gotten to walk out the technology life with. They helped me; I helped them. It’s beautiful, and that concept of networking has led me to where I am today.
I once read a post on social media that went something like, “Being in IT is a lot like being on an inflatable raft full of a bunch of drunk monkeys with sharp sticks out in the middle of the ocean. Everyone expects you to keep the raft afloat, but you’re not allowed to tell the monkeys not to poke holes in it.”
Sound familiar? It should. Here’s to you, K12 Technology Professional.
You show up and read your e-mails. You take phone calls from teachers who think their projector is a SMARTBoard, and vice versa. You add lead time to tickets where someone writes in all caps (well, to be fair it’s not a ticket, it’s just a response to an e-mail you sent three months ago). You have countless times dropped the cat’s cradle you were carefully building to go help someone with something, only to find yourself further and further behind in the ticket queue. You’ve lost sleep over upcoming projects, and how you would find a way to pull it off. I could go on and on, but it’s quittin’ time somewhere.
IT is an often thankless position, so allow me to end my reflection by saying to those of you still in it after all these years how proud I am of each of you for going into the trenches day after day. You guys are fighting a war that most decision-makers cannot understand. You work for peanuts guarding the raft because it’s your duty while the others are oblivious. Even when you win the battle, what does it really look like to them?
How can you make a difference when you are fighting with people who don’t understand what they’re paying you for and why it’s not enough for the expanded threats in recent years, from ransomware to all the other new, nasty hacking tricks?
Will my leaving the K12 Technology Professional space to take a higher paying job in the private sector make a difference? I doubt it.
But allow me to offer you food for thought…
Your work is the cornerstone of modern education. However, the integrity isn’t in one sole entity. We, working together, improve the very material of the cornerstone itself. Each time we come to one another for questions or guidance, one fibrous pore in the cornerstone is filled in. One less crevice through which to break down the entire structure.
Thank you for all you do, K12 Technology Professionals.
Sincerely,
A Former K12 Technology Professional
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