Wednesday, January 22, 2014

January 14, 2014

Today I was supposed to have three MAP tests. I discovered I only had two after logging all the kids in and then calling the teacher ten minutes after they were supposed to be in the lab and asking if they planned on joining me for their test. They did not. The teacher thought she had signed up for tomorrow morning. And we had an assembly this morning so if they had raced down they would have only had about ten minutes to test, which would have been ridiculous. So later in the day we decided on a new test time of Friday morning. This morning was just practice for me, because I need that.

At the assembly, the gym teacher's phone went off again. It feels like it goes off during every assembly. Today was the worst because he was sitting in the middle of the gym, along the side. His phone went off and he couldn't figure out how to turn it off, so he got up, walked to the middle aisle, walked all the way to the back of the gym, and didn't get it turned off until he was out of the gym. It was a bit ridiculous. After the assembly the librarian came up to me and said we need to have a tech. in-service and teach the gym teacher how to turn off his phone.

The two MAP tests that I had today went well. No one fell out of their chairs and almost everyone finished. I also had a group of fifth graders come back down to finish a test they started yesterday and they all managed to finish. One of them took I think somewhere over two hours last time so I was worried that was going to happen again but she managed to go a bit faster this time around. During one of the tests I looked up and my friend's sister was standing outside the lab with a friend, waving very enthusiastically. Apparently she's part of the group that comes to grade schools and talks about animals. When I was in grade school I always thought those people were adults. It turns out they are just high school students. So all this time they were just kids. When I was walking through the office later in the day one of the secretaries was telling me how excited my friend's sister had been when she came back through the office, telling the secretary she didn't know I worked at the school. They secretary thought it was hilarious.

This afternoon I did amazing things with video. At some point in the past the preschoolers put on a little play/recital thing and the principal recorded it on the librarian's iPad. She got two videos. The first was all good. The second one was also good but not all good because once downloaded to the computer, it was upside down. And not on purpose. The librarian also could get it to burn to a CD or a DVD. I came down to the library to take a look at things and made a little progress before having to take a break and go watch the fifth graders finish their test. And I had to take a quick break from that to go up and help a parent in the sixth grade room figure out a presentation website thing. My first question was wondering if the firewall had been taken down. She didn't know so I decided to try a different browser first and then we would try the firewall. Halfway through the new browser the sixth grade teacher came in from outside (where he was playing foursquare with his class and losing and feeling sad about that) and he had the insight that maybe it was the firewall. And it turned out to be that but I didn't mention that it was my first thought so he could have that victory.

Eventually I made it back to the library. I knew that VLC could rotate the video but I didn't know if it could save it so I did a bit of Googling and discovered that it could. It took me a couple attempts to get that right but eventually I got it transformed and converted so it would play right-side up in a player other than VLC. It still wasn't being recognized as a valid format for a DVD though. So I messed around with VLC some more and got the video converted to another file type, and was finally able to burn a DVD. It was a lot of work but I think it all worked out. At the beginning I was fairly certain I would have to take the files home and put it together in my video editing program but I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of things that could be done with VLC. It is much more versatile than I originally suspected, even though I've been using it for years.

Chipotle was good tonight but it felt like the rice was smaller. Not in amount but the size of the individual grains. It was very interesting. The burrito was fine though. I spent the rest of the night watching YouTube videos, playing Cook, Serve, Delicious, and playing a little guitar. Not a very exciting or productive night. I really need to figure out how to bump up the productivity of my evenings. So much time is going to waste.


Tomorrow it is supposed to be cold as hell outside. Which is a ridiculous phrase considering the most commonly held belief about the temperature in Hell but whatever. At least one nearby school is having a two hour delay because of how cold it is supposed to be in the morning. I would like a two hour delay. I'm not banking on it though.

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