January 10, 2014

Last night there was a tiny bit of rain but it dropped close enough to freezing that there were random patches of black ice. The invisible stuff. I came across a few in the driveway but was cautious and didn't slip too much. I thought I was home free but the ice caught up to me right in front of the school. There are a few steps leading up to the front door and there is a ledge that comes out from them and goes toward the street, creating a sort of entryway of sorts on one side of the stairs. I was planting my right foot to make the left turn that would lead me toward the building but when my right foot hit, it just kept going. I'm pretty sure it happened in slow motion. There wasn't a lot of ice so after a foot or two, my right foot stopped moving. It went out far enough that I started toward the ground. I was lined up perfectly with the ledge, thankfully, so I put my elbow how and just kind of slowly when down into a kneeling position for a few seconds with my arm resting on the ledge. My knee hurt a little bit but the impact wasn't that great so I was able to walk it off. As this was happening a para and a student with his mom were coming from the other way and they all asked if I was okay. I raised both hands in the air after getting back to my feet and said I was good. I would have liked too be a spectator on the situation because in my head it was pretty smooth.

Most of my day in the lab today was spent getting ready for MAP testing next week. After the last MAP test I updated my sheets that I write down scores on because the scoring was a little different than last year. Unfortunately I had it saved to my desktop and it was lost after one of the random reformatting weekends that happened to my computer. So I updated the sheets again, including adding new students and getting rid of ones who had moved. I also added the new students to my overall MAP spreadsheet. Then I came up with the lab schedule for the next three weeks, adding in the MAP tests for each class into my regular schedule. I can't remember when I started doing that, maybe State Assessments last year, but it saves a lot of confusion and awkward encounters when everyone can see when the tests are and they can plan accordingly.

Outside of the lab, I fixed a fourth grade laptop by taking the hard drive out and putting it back in. I had to do that earlier in the year as well so it probably isn't the most stable laptop. Although I'm not sure if it's the hard drive or a connection to the hard drive.

I got all but one student intern wirelessly connected to the internet on their laptops. Most of them were able to get on without a problem once they had the right password but the kindergarten intern and the third grade intern were still having trouble. I worked on the kindergarten one for awhile and eventually managed to do something right because we were able to get her on. I was clicking all over the place so I'm not sure what ended up doing the trick, maybe turning her wi-fi off and on, but she's on and hopefully won't have a problem again. The third grade one was the one that stumped me. She has a MacBook, which shouldn't be a problem because other MacBooks are able to connect, and I was able to connect to the main network using my log-in information, but the guest network was a no-go. I messed with it for awhile and tried all sorts of stuff but nothing worked. It is probably something simple but it eluded me. On the plus side, she can use the third grade teacher's log-in information to connect to the wi-fi or plug in with an ethernet cord, so she's not totally out in the cold.

Second grade reading groups went much better than yesterday. I started with the annoying group but we weren't at the listening center and not all of them were there today. It was still a struggle and I wanted to take a whole bunch of points away (because the class is on a point system thing) but I don't feel comfortable with that. Yet. They were working on alliteration and it was like pulling teeth. One kid just couldn't quite get it. He kept wanting to write things like "J is for jellyfish" or "K is for koala". So close yet not really. I had the higher group after that and they had a lot more fun with alliterations. I was able to breathe a little and it was nice.

I had somewhat of a minor breakthrough with the first grader who is still struggling with logging onto a computer in the lab. There is always a lot of prompting and direct hinting but today when he came into the lab he came up to me and told me to come with him because he was going to log into the computer. When he first started calling me over he would say "what do?" a lot and I would eventually tell him how to do everything through pointing and copious amounts of backspacing to erase mistakes. Well, today I only had to give one real hint to get to the Shift key for a capital letter. I still had to prompt him a lot with "what's next?" and "now what?" but he got it all a lot faster than he has in the past. It was pretty cool.

Earlier in the day one of the paras (who none of the other paras really like) asked if I could help her with logging into laptops in the fourth grade room for her Math group. She didn't say the fourth grade room but she said the teacher's name so it was my mistake to assume. After going up to the fourth grade room on third floor I discovered that the para wasn't there. So I went down to the second floor and asked the resource teacher where she was and found out she was down in one of the second grade rooms. This made more sense because I knew she had a second grade Math group and she had talked to me awhile ago about it. So my bad for not going there first. Anyway, I guess she's been struggling with this all year and it seems like she just wasn't having the kids wait long enough at the 'CTRL' + 'ALT' + 'DEL' screen so the laptop didn't have enough time to recognize the network, so it couldn't connect to it. I think this is what I explained to her before but she assured me they were waiting. Guess not. And now that she only has two weeks left, I think I finally got my point across that you have to wait a little bit on that first screen before attempting to log onto the laptop.

After work I came home and did a quick load of laundry because I needed to wash my shirt for the theater. My laundry schedule was a little off last week and happened before my shifts at the theater rather than after. So I had that going and tried to relax a little before having to go to the theater. I was somewhat successful.

There was a lot of running around at school today and that hit me full in the face when I got to the theater tonight. I generally feel tired whenever I walk in the building but tonight when I got upstairs I just felt completely drained. After doing the trailer report I spent about a half an hour just sitting with my eyes closed, trying to pretend I could just go to sleep and forget about work. I spent the rest of my night reading a bit, playing Animal Crossing, and watching all but the first couple of minutes of Lone Survivor. It definitely got the Hollywood treatment and there was a decent amount of creative license but it managed to remain a fairly faithful adaptation to the book. They nailed the falling down the mountain stuff. It was even more painful than I had imagined it in my head when I was reading the book. I read somewhere about a stuntman getting pretty hurt on one of the takes but I would like to see a behind-the-scenes on how they actually pulled it off. You can't fake a lot of what they show. Despite the serious subject matter of the film, they manage to put in some comedic relief and the best line in the movie came when Luttrell was asking an Afghani kid for a knife. The kid came back with a duck and says "Knife". Luttrell replies "It's not a knife, it's a fucking duck."