May 1, 2015

 Once again it is a new month and it seems as if the previous month passed in the blink of an eye. I believe that based on perspective, time does travel faster when you're busy. I also believe it travels faster the older you get, and there is probably some sort of scientific reasoning out there for it but I'm not going to look it up. My reasoning will be based on math. If a person has been alive for 350 months, a month only accounts for 0.28% of that persons life, if my 1:00AM math is correct. If someone has only been alive for 100 months (a child), than one month is equal to 1% of their life. It takes a lot longer to make it through 1% of your life than it does 0.28% of your life. Hence why the old you get, the more months you have lived, which makes those months ever shorter in the grand scheme of your life. Yeah.

I'm currently sleep deprived. Not sure if that is obvious. I was up until sometime after two o'clock last night writing my journal for my group project. I was determined to get it done and I did. Turns out I just can't function unless it is the last minute. It's not due until Sunday, which is coming up, but in this case I think the last minute was wanting to go to bed. I'll have to read over it again before I turn it in but I think it turned out pretty well.

Today felt a bit exhausting due to the lack of sleep but there wasn't wall-to-wall testing so I wasn't falling asleep on my feet in the back of the lab. There weren't any state assessments today but there were two MAP tests in the morning and one right after lunch. There was supposed to be two tests in the morning and two in the afternoon but one of the morning tests was the writing part of the state assessment and that class managed to finish it yesterday, so the second afternoon test moved up to that slot so they wouldn't be rushed by the afternoon assembly. That ended up working out pretty well because two of the kids weren't able to finish in the morning but came back and finished after lunch. Had they tested in the afternoon, they would have had to wait to finish next week.

The assembly this afternoon was the school choir. They had their choir tour today and their last stop was their home turf. Even though they had been singing and dancing all day, they managed to show more enthusiasm than the POPS choir yesterday. Home field advantage probably helps. The best part of the performance was a song about guacamole, that involved a sixth grader and a fourth grader wearing giant sombreros and dancing in front of the choir. At one point during the song the entire choir started a conga line and the two kids in the hats started doing the tango up and down the middle of the gym. It was apparently the sixth grader's idea because originally it was just the choir doing the conga line while those two just danced in place. The tango was a brilliant addition.

In my little bit of free time today I sent the two songs I have found so far for the slideshow to the sixth grade teacher, the principal, and the music teacher. The sixth grade teacher liked them. I need to start assembling the whole thing so I know the runtime and can see if I need another song or two.

I also came up with a design for the front page of the group project. I kept the same idea of the letterhead but I made it a bit bigger, added a green background across the whole page with a gradient, and made a transparent version of the coat of arms to put on the right side. Tonight I made a one for the bottom of the page, which included just the transparent coat of arms and the gradient green background. It doesn't look too bad.

Given the current time, half-past one o'clock in the morning, I obviously had another night of struggling with school work. I eventually managed to make a discussion post, format my individual group page and the front page, and come up with my summary of bibliographic resources. I am happy with both my summary and the section headings I came up with for my page. My favorite was “Do Not Lose, Cite.” It started as a play on words, without the comma, because the source was for a citing resource. So if you used it you wouldn't lose points. Then a couple resources later, someone had one for organizing and managing bibliographic resources and citations. This changed my interpretation of of my section heading to using the organizing resource so you don't lose your sources, and then the second resource to cite those source. So, don't lose your resources, cite them. I think it is kind of clever.

Yesterday I discovered Jam In The Van on YouTube, which has bands playing songs in a van. It's kind of all there in the title. Anyway, I'm hooked. It's now creeping up on two o'clock but I'm probably going to watch a couple more episodes before I go to bed.

My goal for tomorrow is to wake up early-ish, at least before the sun gets too high in the sky, and start working on my research paper. Ideally I would like to find all of my sources tomorrow, plus some extras just to have some wiggle room. I would also like to start skimming through them and figure out the general layout of my paper. I'm going super lofty with all those goals. I'll probably end up sleeping until three in the afternoon and completely blow everything. But I'm also fully prepared to stay up late again tomorrow to work on the paper. Despite my recent struggles and late nights, I still really want to get the majority of the paper done this weekend so I don't have to stress about it all week. Fingers crossed.