Exercise 4 of chromatic’s Write Your Life tells me to:

Create a new invention, change your life circumstances, or somehow write away a difficult or time-consuming task. First define the problem, show how it affects you, and then invent it away.

But I’m not going to do that, exactly, because I already did it.

The Perl 6 Summary is a weekly summary of the traffic in the various Perl 6 related mailing lists. I’ve written it for the last two and a half years, and I’ve managed to pretty much stick to a weekly schedule. But it’s a resource hog. Even once I got into the swing of it, a busy week on the lists could easily mean I would spend 8 hours writing the summary — after all, if you want to write a decent précis of a thread with 100 or so messages in it you’re going to need to read (or at least skim) it. Some threads were easy to handle, especially those in perl6-internals which could often be summarized as

Joe Bloggs had a problem with IMCC’s string parsing. He and Leo discussed it for a while to nail down the problem, then Leo fixed it.

Dan Sugalski’s design documents often prompted rather more discussion, but I could usually hand-wave it away with “… then it all got a bit technical” and simply link to the root of the thread for those who were interested.

The other list, perl6-language is a different matter. It would go quiet for weeks at a time before pulling a Mount Saint Helens and exploding into life. Sometimes there was provocation—an Apocalypse or an Exegesis, say. Sometimes a seeming innocuous starter question or proposal would precipitate a pyroclastic torrent of proposal, counter proposal and the odd moment of sanity. Once things quietened down, you could usually rely on Larry to extract the good stuff, but discussions could run for weeks.

Whilst such behaviour can be seen as a sign of a healthy list, it was far from easy to summarise. Threads would branch off in weird directions, only occasionally reuniting with the main line of the discussion (assuming there even was a main line anyway). Getting something I was happy with could take ages.

Ages I can’t spare any more. So, last week, I gave up writing the summaries. My teacher training course is using too many of my own personal computrons for me to be able to spare the mental effort required to get the summaries written. It’s been a wrench to do it, but it’s a big weight off my mind.

And the feedback from summary readers has been phenomenal. I’ve always solicited feedback in the summaries, and the little I got was positive, but I’ve had more feedback since I stopped than I’ve had in, probably, the last year, and it’s all been good. Which is lovely.

Bah! Paperwork.

As you may or may not know, one of the banes of a teacher’s life is the paperwork. There’s tons of it. Timetables, lesson plans, seating plans, medium term plans, schemes of work. If you’re a trainee then you have fewer lessons, but twice as much paperwork per lesson. UK teacher training is now ‘evidence based’ which means that part of your job as a trainee is to collect evidence of your competence as a teacher. And evidence is usually on paper.

So, anything I can do to reduce the weight of paper I have to tote around every day has to be a good thing. Ideally I want some way of tying everything together. I want clickable seating plans so I can quickly check my notes on a particular pupil. I want all my lesson plans in one place, linked back to any assessments of the lesson as taught. I want links from my timetable to the sets I’m teaching…

In short, I want a Wiki.

One of the great things about the web is that often you don’t have to invent something yourself, you just have to be aware of possible solutions. So on Thursday I grabbed a Wiki installation and spent a couple of hours feeding it some of the information I’ve been gathering about the classes I’ll be teaching in the next half term. It’s great.

I’ve not used a personal Wiki before—I’ve not had the need—but now I’ve started with one, I’m not sure why it’s taken me this long. It’s great. Now, if I can just hack it to generate inline images from TeX markup.

I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want

Teleportation. That’s what I want. I really resent losing an hour and half of every week day to the delights of commuting to Middlesbrough from Gateshead. I drive a Mini Cooper, and it’s a lovely car to drive. But plugging up and down a dual carriageway isn’t where it’s at it’s best. If I could zap myself to and from school every day the problem would be solved. What a shame that our current understanding of The Rules seems to imply that, whilst quantum weirdness doesn’t rule out teleportation, other complexities seem to rule it out big style for anything on the macro scale. Bummer.