Right, so what would you do if you were handed a 2006 Hewlett-Packard printer by your technophile parents and told, “Could you use this?”

If you were you, which you are, no doubt you would have clutched it to your chest, cackling. You would have brought it into school, where you, as a seventh grade English teacher, would have finagled, with batted eyelashes and cookies, one of those cutie tech guys in your building into loading the district-unapproved printer software onto your laptop. You would have announced to your students in hushed, gleeful tones that you had acquired a secret printer and now, their word processing, editing, printing of research, and sharing of their writing would be that much easier and faster. You would have folded your arms smugly, having circumvented the opaque ridiculousness of your upper management of Computer Services taking printers out of classrooms– yes, you read that right, 21st century educators– in favor of one printer per hallway, nearly always located in a Special Ed room, where the buzzing and the clacking of your seven-page modified schedule testing packet drives every Asburger’s child in the room insane.

You would have done this. But if you were me, you would have dropped off the printer at the Salvation Army, congratulated yourself on being thoughtful and clever, and found yourself near crying, a month later, under the weight of your epiphany to the contrary today, as the student in front of you states innocently: “Man, I wish we had a printer in here.”

Man. So do I.

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Post-script. I’m not actually miserable. I’m starting a new reading journal weekly assignment with the kids that I am tickled pink about; not doubt I’ll be blogging about it shortly.