"All is Not Lost"

As students started to trickle into my room this morning, and I fought to keep my composure and an appearance of a sunny disposition, I caught the lyrics “All is not lost” drift out of my speakers.  I paused to listen to the song.  Had I really just heard correctly?  I had to smile at the irony, because at that moment, it truly seemed that all WAS lost…all of my school files, anyway.

Let me go back about half an hour, to when I arrived at school.  As I attempted to open my USB drive to pull up the morning’s vocabulary words and quizzes, the usual error message popped up: “There might be a problem with some files on this disc.  This can happen if you remove the device or disc before all files have been written to it.  Scan and fix?”  (I never bother to properly eject my USB disc; therefore this message comes up every time I plug it back in).  This morning, I decided to be extra careful.  I checked the 2nd box in the error message  which said something about fixing corrupt files after scanning.  But then…when it opened up the file after the scan…my folder names were no longer in English.

And apparently I am destined to create one of the folders in the year 2032, because that’s when it was “last updated,” now. 

In desperation, I tried clicking on the files anyway.  They wouldn’t open.  I yanked out the USB disc and plugged it into my desktop computer.  No “scan and fix” message…and the files are still gobbeldy-gook.  Nothing opens. 

At all. 

Nothing. 

Apparently, by clicking that 2nd message, I reformatted my flash drive.  Which it seems is something I cannot undo.

What was on the flash drive?  Oh, just everything I have created for school this year…lesson plans, quizzes, tests, discussion guides, vocabulary lists, writing prompts, worksheets, rubrics… everything.
Did I have anything saved anywhere else?  Of course not; that would have been too intelligent.  I used the flash drive because I constantly was moving between my laptop and my desktop; saving everything in two locations would simply have taken too much time out of my busy schedule.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. 

On the bright side, I had printed out all of my lesson plans, so I’m still planned for the next week and a half.  And I printed the tests for next week and had already submitted them for copies to be made.  Some of my activities for my 7th grade unit are saved onto a cd, so I still have somewhere to start to rebuild.  And a few assignments are posted on our class webpage, from which I can recover them. 

So I guess maybe OK Go is right… All is not lost. 
But it still seems that way.
Life goes on.  Lesson learned.  The hard way.   

"All is Not Lost" by OK Go

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