This isn't the Junior High...

"This isn't the junior high..." is the line I kept hearing from the school's police officer as I was filing a police report yesterday. Sometime Wednesday night, someone broke into my room via the window, stole my laptop computer, smoked a few cigarettes, and left. While the laptop costs about $1600 to replace, it was worth much more than that to me. It was worth all of my work during my last 2 years of teaching. All of my lesson plans, worksheets, quizzes, tests, and grades are currently sitting in the hands of a thief who is too stupid to even hack through my password protected login. It is a worthless machine to them, a prize that they can hide in their closets and hope that their parents don't find.

The best part is that when I contacted our technology department about getting a replacement, they unsympathetically told me that it could take many weeks for them to order and set up a new computer for me. We can just chalk this up to another roadblock in having the ability to do my job. Why do teachers stay in this profession?