August 26, 2013

Today at work flew by. Minus an hour or two in the afternoon. As I walked into the school this morning the principal was there and she asked if I could help serve food at lunch. The lab schedule isn't really set yet but I was fairly certain I had the time to do that so I agreed. Then a little while later one of the second grade teachers asked me if I could help out with reading centers like I did last year. That was supposed to end right before lunch so I agreed to that as well. And the music teacher wanted me to look at her projector so I started my day with that.

The projector is mounted on the ceiling and there is a pull-down screen a few feet from the whiteboard. But she doesn't want to use the screen, she wants to just project onto the whiteboard. The projector was set up to project onto the screen though, so it is way too big on whiteboard, even after turning the knob to make the screen smaller. My kinda-fix was to go into the settings and make a custom size where I shrunk the screen even more and then adjusted the vertical position to move it onto the whiteboard. It would fit perfectly on the whiteboard but there is a paper boarder around it. I was pretty happy it worked out though.

The reading groups in second grade this year are different. At least for now. The groups are in the room and then rotate every fifteen minutes or so. It is the beginning of the year so they are all pretty much like first graders, and I had one group that was ridiculous and annoying, but the other group was pretty good. In that second group was a girl with Downs Syndrome and I made her laugh so that pretty much made my day. She was eating the eraser off the end of her pencil and I told her to stop but she kept trying to sneak it back up to her mouth. And every time she did I would push the pencil away. And then I was doing it just because until she finally said “I'm not eating it” and started laughing.

Reading groups ran a little long so I missed the first group at lunch but I was there for the rest of it. I served peaches to a bunch of kids and steamed vegetables to far less. Not surprising there. The best moment was a fifth grader talking to one of her classmates. She put her tray down as they were waiting to put in their lunch numbers and said “Are they trying to feed us? Because it doesn't look like it.” It was pretty funny.

After lunch I had two classes back to back in the lab so I didn't actually get to eat lunch until after 1:30PM, which is about two hours later than I usually eat lunch. But I survived. And the rest of the afternoon was sloooow. For the last hour I put more work into my student directory. After hitting a wall in my attempt to make a printer the default printer for all users on a computer. I came across a couple different options, one of which didn't work because I didn't have administrator access, and the other one involved writing a script and I doubt I had the access to enable that either. So I'm putting that mission on the back burner for the time being. It really isn't that hard to pick a printer when you need to print and it's generally only fourth grade and up that ever print.

In terms of successes, after the projector in the morning, I fixed a printing issue for one of the SPED teachers. Every time she tried to print a PDF it would ask her to save and it wouldn't print. And if she went to wherever the PDF supposedly saved, it wouldn't be there. I had a complete bit of luck and decided to click on the advanced printer options and one of the options in there was to print to file, so I unchecked that and it started to work. I'm a genius. I also added a printer to one of the fourth grade teacher's computer. It somehow never got added to the list of printers (like the SPED printer I added onto the SPED teacher's computers). So it has really come in handy that I spent all those hours figuring out how to add printers using Print Management and IP addresses.

After work I used my stepper for awhile, did not a lot, ate some dinner, and then played Saints Row 4. Such a fun game. I several cool vehicles to my garage that don't appear in normal traffic. I've only seen them show up at flashpoints. One of them is the 4-wheeler which I spent some time looking for but the area where it was parked in the last game is destroyed in this game. I'm going to check out my new cars tomorrow and hope that I can customize them.

I hope that tomorrow is a little less hectic than this morning was. Even though it made the day go by faster. I just want to settle into a normal routine so I know that I have stuff to do all day and don't get stuck with hours of downtime. I'll get there eventually.