Incredible news! I got an overhead projector. Two, actually, which means that one of my fellow MTC teachers will get one of them, since none of us had one until now. There were two in my room that didn't work, and when trying to fix it myself with the help of Buffy, filing the paper work at the beginning of the year, talking to the principal, and talking to the maintenance people didn't work, I'd sort of given up hope. Though we had thought about buying one, they are quite expensive to spend your own money on, and Buffy and I had already combined our EEF money to order dissection materials for our lab, which can also be quite expensive. This morning, however, when administration finally gave us surplus/ broken stuff removal forms, I figured I'd give it one more shot and mention it to the head maintenance man, Mr. W. He directed me to the librarian, who for some reason has reign over the kingdom of overhead projector parts. Encouraged since this was the farthest I'd ever gotten, I brought all three sizes of bulb directly back to Mr. W, who directed me to bring them back to my room for his later, but same-day, use. When he did not arrive by the end of the day, I dropped him another friendly reminder at the end of the school day- when I'd asked earlier, he said it was okay to remind him if he happened to forget. I stayed after school until 4:3o with my creative expression group. When I began to kick them out (I don't like to, but I've got to do it some time) and they started leaving around 4:35, Mr. W. showed up. We began taking stuff apart and putting different parts in, trying this and that, until we finally realized the machines work only when the top is closed (seems obvious, but it almost made the difference between having two and having none). I cannot believe, myself, how excited I was at this development. I immediatley searched through my cabinet where I had remembered placing some transparencies, and started tearing into them until I had a nice little collection to use for tommorrow's lesson. There are tons of the things. Colorful, detailed, accurate, clear, labeled diagrams that it would take me hours to produce on my own. Chemistry concepts, biology concepts, difficult concepts broken down on a picture that I can show the whole class at once- and add my own notes to. Awesome. Anatomy pictures, charts, graphs, phase change diagrams. Also, I can write my notes out ahead of time so that I save all that class time writing on the board, erasing, risking not staring directly at my class the entire time, etc. And now two of us can have them, and I'm sure we'll manage to share. Yes, I'm a bit ashamed that I didn't figure out a way to get one before now, but hey, better late than never. It's a small victory.