September 3, 2015

 Stuff and things. My brain is fried at the moment so we'll see how much I remember from my day.

I made more Dolch word cards today, this time for the other second grade teacher. It involved some math to figure out the most efficient use of paper, and a little bit of cutting to divide up the straggling cards from each word list.

I finished scanning one of the new reading books and started scanning another one. After the current one there is one left but I don't know that it is being used by anyone so I might just wait for someone to ask me about it before I take the time to scan it.

There were several classes in the lab today, including both kindergarten classes. I couldn't be a kindergarten teacher. Even if it paid exceptionally well, which it never will. The most hectic class was one of the second grade classes, the one with a native Spanish speaker and a native Chinese speaker. It took awhile to get the Spanish kid logged in and then the ELL assignments in Compass Learning wouldn't work because of a Flash issue. I tried updating it and three different browsers but nothing worked. I finally got him into a Spanish/English game on ABCya.

Then I moved onto the Chinese girl and was even less successful. I eventually managed to find an animal matching game but it was either beyond her or she wasn't into it. Probably both. It showed the name of the animal in English and the possible answers were in Chinese. I opened up Google translator to figure out what the answer was, mostly for my own benefit, and then tried to draw the animal in Paint to give her a hint as to what the answer was. I'm not an artist, and I probably should have just Googled images of the animals, but it probably wouldn't have helped.

I didn't really have any downtime today so I feel like I'm probably forgetting something but it's late so I'm moving on.

Before dinner I finally finished the article I was reading for one of my classes. Other than one tiny article, that is all I have read this week. I am so behind. I'm not going to be tested over this stuff but I am genuinely interested in the information, even if it is a tad dry at times, so I want to catch up.

For dinner I had the leftover fake chicken fajitas that my sister made the other night. I still had the second half of my Chipotle burrito but I figured that would last longer than the fajitas.

I spent the rest of the night writing my two discussion posts for my classes. It was a struggle, which is why my brain is currently fried. For one of my articles I had to summarize and discuss the article I read. It is hard to summarize a twenty-page article that is organized more as a rambling essay than an academic study. I think I did a decent job but I think my summary also turned out a bit rambly. For the other discussion post I had to talk about metadata, mostly based on an article I quickly read more than half of and a couple chapters, which I read a couple paragraphs of (just enough to get a reference). I felt out of my depth on that one. And the first one if I'm being honest. I need to do better next week.

I've been listening to The Weeknd's new CD a lot this week and it gets better on every playthrough. Just a random thought I guess, because I'm listening to it as I write this.

Anyway, it's after midnight and I need to go to bed so I can wake up in the morning. Yay. I'm looking forward to watching more Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. because I am approaching the end of the first season and things are up in the air. People are good and then they're bad and then they're good and then they're bad and so on and so forth. I'm not looking forward to the elliptical, but it has been easier the past two days because I think the start button is completely broken so I haven't been able to turn the resistance on. Oh well. I'm still running.