This morning I woke up a couple minutes before my alarm was set to go
off and that is a good thing. A couple minutes later I heard my
alarm click on but the radio didn't actually play. There was just
silence. So that could have been bad. My backup alarm clock is the
dogs being let out upstairs because there is a mad stampede and loads
of barking as they run to go outside. And that didn't happen this
morning until seven o'clock because my mom overslept. I'm just
saying it is a good thing I was already awake.
Today there were two scheduled tests with a couple small groups
coming in to finish tests. Usually the full testing days go by the
fastest but today seemed to fly by. When I wasn't testing I did
things. I made a list of all the students in the school for one of
the lunch ladies, which wasn't too bad because most of it was cutting
and pasting the names and numbers I had already typed up for my
testing spreadsheets. Those lists had spaces in between the names
and I learned that there is a way in Excel to select all of the blank
rows and delete them. That saved me so much time. There is also a
way to select every other row and change the background color, all
with a simple formula. That is obviously a lot faster than having to
click every other row in a list of over 200 kids. Possibly well over
200 kids, I wasn't actually keeping track.
There wasn't too much downtime in my day because when there wasn't a
test I had normal classes in the lab. So maybe that is why the day
went so fast. The last class of the day was fifth grade and while
talking to the teacher I ended up genuinely laughing, like couldn't
help myself. It started with the koala wedding, which I'll talk
about, but it really got me when she was telling me about pencils
with names. She was talking to the fifth grade teacher from last
year who got married over the summer and had to move away. She got a
new fifth grade teaching job and she said that her class had decided
to name all their pencils. She sent a picture and the teacher I was
talking to said she could see epic names, like Super Pencil, but then
the old teacher asked if she could see the pencil in the background.
This pencil was broken and splintered and just beat up. And its name
was Judy. It's just so ridiculous. All these epic pencils and then
there's poor Judy.
Now, the fifth grade class in the lab hadn't named their pencils but
they did have a full-blown toy koala wedding at recess. An
incredibly detailed and well planned out wedding. Several of the
girls in the class actually wore dresses. The whole thing started
with three small toy koalas, not much bigger than a golf ball. An
informal system was developed where the koalas would go home with a
different kid every day, kind of like when baby chicks are hatched
and kids take them home for a night. Well, one of the kids has a dog
and the dog completely destroyed one of the koalas. Tore it apart.
This was the grandpa koala and the kids ended up making a coffin for
it and put in all the little bits and pieces. And in case you were
wondering, grandpa was able to attend the wedding. In his coffin.
The wedding took place at recess. There was a pillow for the ring to
sit on and one of the girls brought a tiny basket of tiny fake flower
petals. The teacher didn't want her to actually drop them because it
was a windy day and they would have been irretrievable. I don't know
what was used for a ring but it was big enough to be a collar, but
not big enough to go over the koala's head, so they had to pop the
head off to put the ring on. Oh, and they gave the male koala a bath
in the sink before the wedding but his colors ran or something and he
went from being gray to black. I don't know if that was the cause of
it but shortly after the wedding, like almost immediately, the koalas
got divorced. In the chaos of the wedding going to crap, I think the
girl koala ran away and everyone chased ran after it, at which point
the tiny fake flower petals exploded into the air. And at one point
one of the kids started crying because someone else told him he was
the reason the wedding was ruined.
So freaking elaborate. When the kids were lining up to leave the lab
the teacher had the girl who kind of started the whole thing show me
the girl koala and I made some comment about it being newly single
and the girl said that the boy koala had apologized (for whatever he
had done) and that they might be getting back together. It is like a
soap opera. I'm stuck watching kids test all day and there is a real
life toy koala soap opera going on only a couple floors above me.
At the end of the day I fixed a laptop for one of the third grade
teachers, by changing the display from portrait view back to
landscape. That happens a handful of times each year and I have
never figured out how. Kids don't have access to the screen
resolution options so they shouldn't be able to do that. My only
guess is that it happens when a teacher has logged into a laptop for
a student, but I don't know. It's strange. Anyway, when I got down
to the third grade room the teacher told me about another laptop that
wouldn't turn on. Initially I thought it might be a power issue,
like it wasn't getting charged properly, but all the cords were
plugged in. I plugged it into the charger for another laptop, just
in case, and that didn't seem to have any effect but I also thought
it might be a hard drive issue because there is a laptop in fourth
grade that needs to have its hard drive pulled out every now and then
to “fix” it. So I opened up this laptop to have a look. While
doing that I had another thought so I swapped out the the battery
with another laptop and it powered right on. And the other laptop
did not. So now I think it is purely a battery issue, not a hard
drive issue or a power cord issue. Just in case I plugged it in to
another power cord and we'll see on Monday if it works.
After that I went across the hall to one of the second grade rooms to
give the teacher a little grief about a table she is trying to get
rid of. And I ended up staying to help out with her projector again.
She said the blue projected image was big but when she tried to show
her computer screen it was smaller. My theory was that it was a
resolution issue, which is what it turned out to be. It seems that
normally when you plug a computer into a projector, the computer
adopts the resolution of the projector, but that wasn't happening in
this case. Instead, the projector was projecting the widescreen
resolution of the computer. So it was as wide as it could be but
much shorter and everything looked much smaller because of the higher
resolution. Lowering the resolution to a square format made a
dramatic difference, and I showed the teacher how to do this so she
can easily switch back and forth.
When I got home I finished writing up my interview and was able to
submit it before dinner. Dinner ended up being a fairly impromptu
family pizza night. The pizza was good as was the conversation. I
ended up talking too much because by the end of it my voice had given
me a headache. That is one frustrating thing about my low voice. It
vibrates in my head just enough that if I talk too much I get a
headache.
After dinner I watched a bunch of YouTube videos and I wrote a long
response to one of my classmates on the discussion post for this
week. I was envisioning a future with virtual reality and 3D-modeled
digital collections. I think it will happen.
Tomorrow, I need to focus on my group project. And take a look at my
other upcoming assignments to make sure I don't get surprised. I
know there is another one for my metadata class that I should already
be working on so I need to look into that. It is due next Sunday,
the same day that my group project is due, and I've got class next
weekend so I won't have much time to work on it that weekend. I have
to create complete metadata records using Dublin Core for five
digital resources, and a brief glance at the instructions makes it
look a bit intense. So maybe tomorrow is all about my group project
(and reading for next week) and Sunday is all about this metadata
assignment. Sounds like a decent plan.
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