October 5, 2015

 This morning I helped out in both kindergarten rooms for literacy centers. I might end up with a cold tomorrow because I got coughed on several times. But the kids were mostly well-behaved, so it could have been worse.

I printed off MAP reports today and gave them to the teachers. All except for one that I'm still waiting on for a score to be deleted. It is one of those tricky ones where the kid went so fast that a score doesn't show up on screen and they have to take the test again. But in reality they do get a score and it shows up in their overall score instead of the score they got the second time. It is annoying. I'm still working on my spreadsheets. I finished the main page but I also have a second page that shows the change from the previous test. I will get that to the teachers eventually.

This year instead of getting a CD with the school pictures on it we got a website where we can go and download the pictures. So that is what I did today. I would have preferred the CD because on the website you have to download a zip file with the picture software and all the pictures, which is exactly what the CD has, but it doesn't take as long to download. Whatever. Also annoying, is the fact that you can't get the hi-res pictures from the website, like we need for the yearbook, you still have to contact them and have them send you a CD with the hi-res pictures. I imagine the main reason for not having them on the site would be the increased bandwidth from downloading them. But they aren't huge pictures so it is still kind of ridiculous. Anyway, I downloaded all the stuff and made sub charts for the teachers, which is just a page with all the kids' pictures and names that a teacher can leave in their sub plans so a substitute can put a name and face together. Tomorrow I might make some for some of the other, non-classroom teachers in the building, like SPED and resource.

When I got home I checked on the group discussion thing for this week that involves us answering the questions from a case study in one of our books, in the form of a wiki page that we all add to throughout the week. Well, I ended up with the largest group with thirteen people, out of a class of thirty I think, and one of those people is a huge overachiever. To the point that over the course of five edits yesterday she pretty much finished the entire assignment. It is mildly frustrating to say the least. We are being graded like we would for a discussion post, so multiple posts throughout the week. If one person fulfills all the requirements for the assignment, the day before the week even starts, where does that leave the other twelve people in the group. Selfish is a word that comes to mind but I think that insinuates malicious intent, which is not the case with this classmate. She's just very on the ball. To the detriment of everyone else in her group in this case. I managed to squeeze a couple, very tiny things in tonight but it certainly won't put much of a dent in the twelve points I need for the week. If no one else speaks up I might send an email to the professor just to see if there is something else we can do in addition to what is asked for in the case study to actually give the rest of the group a chance at participation. Maybe treat it like an Etch-a-Sketch, now that it's all done we can shake it clear and let everyone else have a go. Especially considering most people don't even start posting on the discussions until Wednesday at the earliest and this was done on Sunday. We'll see what happens.

Tonight I went to a comedy show and it was hilarious. The first opening act was really good and the next two had their moments. The headliner was worth the price of admission, though. He added in a bunch of new stuff and he was just as funny all of his TV specials. He definitely deserves all of his success because he is such a good storyteller. Because of the new material they really harped on the use of cellphones. They went on and on about if you were caught with a phone you would be kicked out. I didn't see this happen to anyone but all the roving security were probably enough to scare people from trying. Each aisle had two people walking up and down the entire time, non-stop. There were also people near the exit doors and a bunch of people roaming around the floor seating. It was kind of incredible.

The best part of the show was probably the fact that we started out in row 32, which is two or three rows from the top, and ended up getting moved down to row 6 because they were trying to fill in the more expensive seats that didn't sell. Those seats were $16 more per ticket, so that's a decent amount of money. And rather than shift everyone down they started at the back and started sending rows down at a time. I kind of liked that we were near the top and didn't have to walk all the way down the stairs, but then we did, and we were way better for it. I don't think we would have been able to hear as well from where we were originally. The funny part was that there were at least a couple groups of people a few rows in front of us who had moved down several rows already when it got closer to the start time and they were filling up. Then all the rows at the back, including the ones these people were originally sitting in, got moved down all the way to the front. If only they had waited.

I was reminded today that the last day for my metadata class is on Friday. Which is great news but it also means that my metadata crosswalk assignment is due on Friday, not Sunday like most of our assignments. Yikes. I'm glad I got a start on it this weekend but I really could have used another weekend. It doesn't help that I didn't get to work on it at all tonight, though I do not regret my decision to take the night off, regardless of how things turn out. I'll just need to put in some late nights this week. Hooray.