November 17, 2014

The first time I woke up this morning, all was well. Ten minutes later, I woke up with a sharp headache behind my left eye. After some ibuprofen the headache eventually subsided by mid-morning. Thankfully.

During second grade reading groups this morning there was a very pleasant kid. I didn't have him during my first two groups but I had the opportunity for the last group. First he wouldn't work because someone was in his seat, even though it wasn't really his seat, it was just the seat he wanted to sit in. Then he didn't want to work on the worksheets so he threw them on the ground. Then he demanded the mother helping or I clean off the desk he was at so he had room to work. Then he demanded that I sharpen his pencil. I must say, none of his demands were met. He would not make a very good hostage taker. Whenever we would ask him a question he would just point at one of his worksheets where he had written “NO!!!!”. He had apparently acted the same way in his first group. What a peach.

Later in the morning when that class came to the lab, I was put in charge because the teacher had to go to a doctor appointment. Thankfully the class behaved better normal and no one misbehaved. From the lab I was supposed to lead them outside for lunch recess but we ended up having indoor recess because of the cold. There is a Boys & Girls Club guy who is a recess supervisor at lunch but he was in the other second grade room and didn't actually pop over to our room until it was time for the kids to clean up. So it is a good thing I decided to stay so the kids weren't left on their own. I ended up playing Connect Four with one of the kids. I let him win the first game and then accidentally won the two games after that. I had no reason for the placement of any of my pieces and it ended up working out for me. He was a really good sport about it and even said “good game” afterward, which was surprising and pretty cool.

We got the higher resolution student pictures in today, which included the retake pictures, so I spent a little while today renaming all of those and remaking my sub charts. I then printed off a copy of the sub charts and took them down to the library along with the new picture CD (the low-res one because she doesn't need big pictures) so she could update her library system. She came down to the lab a little while later so I could help her do that. Last year it was a bit of a pain because we didn't have the picture CD and I had to figure out how the files needed to be named for her system and then I think rename the ones I had. Or find the right ones and get the folder sorted out. I can't remember. But it was a pain in the butt. This year it was super simple. We just dragged the image folder to her desktop, turned it into a ZIP file, and then imported it into her system. Super easy.

I ended up not having any classes in the lab this afternoon so I made a little progress on my latest reflective journal entry. I think I added a paragraph. I also emailed one of the researchers for the group that did library anxiety because I wanted to reference one of their articles. She sent me the article tonight, which was really nice of her. Tonight after dinner I finished writing the entry, including the reference to the article, but it was before the article, so I need to go back and add the author. I should have finished that entry, my third, last week but I wouldn't have had the idea for the library anxiety thing so it all worked out. Sometimes I feel like some of my ideas just can't be rushed, which is why procrastination becomes a thing. If I didn't procrastinate, at least in terms of writing, I would end up with an inferior product.

Speaking of articles, sort of, I got 38/40 on my annotated bibliographies. That is apparently half a point lower than the highest score and a little over a point above the average. Not bad.

Now, going back to the reflective journal entries. Now that I have finished up the third one, I have four more to go. I would like to finish the next two this week. I don't actually remember what they are over but I'm going to start on the fourth one tomorrow. I really hope I am in the ballpark for what the teacher is looking for because I never got around to sending him an example. And at this point I'm a little afraid to because if I am way off base I'm kind of screwed. So I'm just going to continue operating under the assumption that I am doing a decent job. And hope that I am not working under false assumption.

It is now almost ten o'clock and I've got a headache so I'm going to call it a night.