September 4, 2015

I've been popping my knuckles a lot this past week. I need to figure out something else to do with my hands.

Things happened today. Classes came to the lab. This morning one of the second grade classes came and I spent a good chunk of time playing Bingo with the Spanish speaking kid. It would read the word in Spanish and he had to find it in English. I included animals, which I don't really know, so I had Google translator open on half of the screen so I could try and figure it out. He was able to get a few of them right on the first try and each time he got really excited about it. It was pretty cool. It was also nice to learn that I haven't forgotten all of my Spanish.

Also with second grade, before helping anyone else I got the Chinese girl logged in because the last time she didn't get logged into until the last five minutes or so of lab time. In that process I think I learned that finger crossing is a universal sign for luck or hoping or whatever. I had her typing in all her stuff by pointing at it, and saying it out loud even though she probably didn't understand any of it. After hitting 'Enter' I said “And now we do this and hope it works” as I crossed my fingers. I got a smile out of her so I'm taking that as understanding the symbol.

This afternoon I made several trips back and forth between the lab and the office because one of the office ladies was printing the school newsletter in the lab. She printed out 230 one-sided copies, and then I had to put small stacks at a time in the bypass tray so she could print a calendar on the other side. Both pages were in the same document so I'm not sure why she didn't just print them on both sides to begin with but whatever. I lost track of how many times I went back and forth trying to get the second half of the printing to pull from the bypass tray. It eventually worked, though. And then I gave the entire stack to the librarian because there was a small section for her Twitter account but they forgot the underscore and without it, the account wouldn't show up in a search. She decided to write in the underscore on all of them and was eventually helped by the office ladies.

When I was coming back from giving the newsletters to the librarian I ran into one of my old volunteer supervisors in the hall (because her daughter goes to the school) and we talked for awhile about school and life. Then the librarian came and got me to see if I could help one of the first grade teachers who was trying to translate her newsletter into Spanish and Chinese.

I learned from the teacher that Word (and possibly all Office programs) has the ability to translate whole documents. When you do that it opens up in a browser window and kind of looks like crap. Especially when you're going from a newsletter with a colorful border and pictures, to a poorly formatted, plain text document that doesn't print right. I messed with it for a bit and it seemed like the best solution for the time being is to translate the whole document and then copy and paste the translation back into the newsletter, getting rid of the original English text as you go. I have no idea how accurate the translation is though, seeing as how I don't know any Chinese and only a tiny bit of Spanish. Google seems fairly accurate but who knows about Microsoft. I guess this first newsletter will be a trial run and we'll see if the parents say anything.

Speaking of translating, earlier in the day the Spanish speaking first grader ended up biting a kid twice. The principal was using a translation app on her phone that lets her speak into it and then it either shows you or says the translation. Well, she asked the girl something along the lines of “Why were you mad?” The translation went in a different direction, however, and came up with “Why were you crazy?” So close.

Throughout the day I tried reading an article for one of my classes about the first amendment and law libraries. I couldn't do it. I couldn't get a sense of where it was going or why it was going there. I might try and skip past some of the dense stuff and see if there is anything that I can get through without falling asleep. That will come after I give the rest of the reading for this week a shot.

After work I went to Target and bought food and things before heading home. They didn't have the shower soap I usually get so I went with something new. It smells pretty good in the bottle so hopefully the same is true when it is out of the bottle. I'll find out in a month or so when I finally run out of my current soap, because I am awful at judging how much longer something is going to last.

I responded to a few discussion posts tonight but I didn't do any reading. Even though I took most of the week off from reading, I couldn't bring myself to read tonight. I plan on reading most of tomorrow and Sunday. It's a bit lofty in terms of a goal but why not.