21st or 20th century at school?

Today was a normal day at school, and sometimes when I stop and think about what a good day entails, technologically, I just have to laugh. How do we expect to hold teachers to a high standard and to work efficiently and have a 21st century school system with outdated technology?

Here is my day. I arrive and go into my office, where I do not turn on my computer. Why don't I turn on my computer? Because:

1. It is a mac that is so ancient that I can pump 4 to 6 oz in the time it takes to open up safari or internet explorer. It is so slow that I can not do anything on the computer in my prep time (15 min. of planning I have at the end of the day after teaching).
2. It is not set up to print. Why not? Because it hasn't been set up to print for over two years now and the vice principal/defacto IT person "doesn't have time" and won't show me how to do it.
   
3. After reporting to the school on two different occasions that it was not set up to print, I stopped pestering people about it, because of #1. What am I going to print?

Now, if I feel like this is a problem, my two office mates are the psychologist (confidential information anyone?) and the speech therapist (more confidential information) really can't work without computers. They are required by law to have computers and a confidential printer, and lucky them, the special ed department got them their own printers and laptops. I am not so lucky.

Here is what happens when I need to print something. Today, I was supposed to print out five pages of a reading evaluation for a teacher during my third literacy block. Since the teacher asked me to do this after I had started teaching for the day, I was going to print them out for her during my 50 min. lesson with her students.

I went to the computer lab, which actually does have a printer (a little mini inkjet like you might get for free along with a computer purchase), and found the documents and pressed print.

Nothing printed out of the only working computer lab printer.

I then printed to the library, which was my only other option. The library is at the other end of the school and its printer has been making black smudges on the paper since the first day of school. It has yet to be fixed.

Now it was time to make 4 copies of my smudgy printed sheets. I went to the copy machine and press copy. It shot out two sets, broke down, I fixed it, and then it finished copying. Twenty minutes later, I have printed out exactly five pieces of paper and made 4 copies of each piece of paper. 20 pages in 20 minutes. Or a minute a page. I think I could write faster than that!

The amazing thing is I work in a good school in a good district. One of the big problems in my district is that it's shrinking instead of growing, so funding is getting cut and anything that resembles infrastructure is crumbling. I've worked with less, but I would like to be able to be efficient.

Anyone have a printer and semi-decent computer they want to donate to me?! LOL. Just kidding, but it sure would be nice!