October 27, 2014

Back to the grindstone. It is going to be super weird working a full five-day week. I don't know if I can handle it, especially on top of all the school work I need to get done.

Last week there was a discussion in the office about chocolate chip cookies and one of the ladies mentioned these raisin granola bars with cream cheese mixed in that she makes. I said they sounded pretty good, she said she would bring me some, and she actually did. I figured it was one of those offhand comments or that she would have forgotten in the intervening five days. So that was a nice surprise. And they were really good.

This morning I went and helped out with second grade reading groups. My first group worked on dictionary worksheets, for the next I played word games with the kids who were done (and got my butt kicked), and the final group worked on reading a non-fiction book and filling out a worksheet. While that group did that I read about birds of prey. One page showed a mother hawk looking at two eggs in her nest. There was an instruction to hold the page up to a light to see what was in the eggs, and when you did that you could see little hawk embryos. A very simple trick but also very cool. That seems like it should be a trick utilized in more books. It got me thinking about possible ideas, like maybe have a book where you're trying to find hidden things in a picture and when you think you have found them all you can hold the page up and see the various things circled. I think there is some potential there.

In the middle of reading groups the teacher got a phone call from the principal telling her that she (the teacher) smelled smoke and needed to pull the fire alarm. The teacher announced to the class that she smelled smoke and they needed to line up and go outside. She kept the ruse going for all of five seconds before saying she didn't really smell smoke but we were having a fire drill so everyone needed to line up. Then she went out in the hall and pulled the alarm, which got everyone moving a bit faster. A second grader in the class across the hall wanted to hold my hand as we walked out so I held it all the way out to the playground and then we had to switch hands because we had to turn around and face the other direction. It was kind of cute. We also may or may not have gotten in trouble for talking on the way out to the playground.

This afternoon I went down to one of the third grade rooms to help them get logged into laptops and then ended up staying to help them look up information on bats. The one group with the most trouble had picked vampire bats, and I think maybe 'vampire' is in the firewall settings somewhere because a lot of the sites working for other groups weren't working for them. I ended up finding a few so were able to keep up with the other groups.

When there weren't classes in the lab, and I wasn't out of the lab in a classroom, I worked on designing a fake currency for one of the former resource ladies who is now working for Boys & Girls Club but is still in the building. She is having trouble keeping some of the kids engaged so she wanted to try some extrinsic incentive. I think the money came out looking pretty good. I'll have to get her opinion on it tomorrow.

After work I came over to the new house so I could start working on my annotated bibliographies without the distraction of the dogs. Originally I started going through the first article, briefly outlining the bits that sounded interesting. This took me up until dinner.

When I had finished eating, and maybe taking a little longer to eat than necessary because I wasn't thrilled about getting back to work, I went down to my room and got back to work. I continued reading through the article and realized that my basic outline was already several hundred times bigger than desired length for my annotated bibliography. So I dropped the outlining approach. Instead I jumped down to the purpose, crammed that into a sentence, jumped down to the method, crammed that into sentence, and then crammed the results into a sentence. There was another sentence in there but I can't remember where. I was doing an alright job until I got to the final result because they didn't come right out and say what the hell happened. Had this been several years ago when I was still in college and taking a statistics class I could have looked at the tables and deciphered what was going on with the data, but I am living in the present and I don't remember any of that statistical jargon. I eventually pulled something out of my ass but who knows.

I need to call this good so I can head back to the new house and write another bibliography before I go to bed. My goal was three a day but now my goal is at least two a day. Now that I have a better system for things I can hopefully bump it up to three a day starting tomorrow.