The fibre line was cut at 6:40 in the morning by a digger two streets away, and by the time I reached the school gate at 7:15 the entire building had quietly reverted to 1987.
I did not know this yet. I knew only that Ms Haddad was standing in the corridor holding a piece of paper, which was unusual, and that the paper had handwriting on it, which was more unusual still.
"No network," she said. "No registers, no projectors, no printing. Plan B."
I did not have a Plan B. My entire lesson lived on a slide deck in a folder in a data centre I could not name.
Here is what I expected to happen: chaos, wasted hours, a day to be apologised for.
Here is what actually happened.
In the first period, having nothing to show them, I asked my Grade 8 class what they already knew about earthquakes. I wrote their answers on the board. It took nine minutes and I learned more about what they misunderstood than my last three quizzes had told me. One student thought earthquakes were caused by the weather. Two others agreed with her. That misconception had been sitting in the room all term, underneath my slides, and I had never once looked for it.
In the second period the Grade 10s were supposed to be doing research. Instead they had one library, four atlases and a set of encyclopaedias with a 2009 copyright. They complained for six minutes. Then something interesting: they began arguing about which source to trust, out loud, with reasons. When the encyclopaedia and the atlas disagreed on a population figure, they had no third source to break the tie, so they had to reason about which was more likely to be current and why. I had been trying to teach that skill with a worksheet for two years.
At lunch the staff room was louder than usual. Nobody was answering email. Two teachers who had worked in the same building for six years discovered they were teaching overlapping topics.
I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this essay that ends with a comfortable moral about how we would all be better off without technology, and I do not believe that. By the last period my students were copying a diagram off the board that they could have zoomed into, rotated and animated. Three of them could not see it properly. The student who uses a screen reader had no lesson at all that afternoon, and no amount of nostalgia fixes that. The connection came back at 5:50 and I was relieved.
But I noticed what I had stopped doing. I had stopped asking classes what they knew before telling them. I had stopped letting an argument run because a search could settle it in four seconds. I had stopped leaving space.
The network was never the problem. The network was simply so good at filling the space that I had forgotten the space was where the learning happened.
I still use the slides. I also start every unit now with nine minutes and a whiteboard.