October 6, 2015

 My work days have been so filled with work lately. It's both good and bad. Today I had several different small projects going at the same time and I kept pausing one thing to do another. It was mildly hectic but I got things done. I exported data about the school pictures so I could import it into Excel, format it, cut and paste it into Notepad, save it as a .bat file, and run it in order to rename all the pictures, in bulk, from the student number to the student name. It was a bit of a process but I figured it out last year or the year before and it saves me a hell of a lot of time. It took me for-freaking-ever to figure it all out in the first place but not having to individually rename 350 pictures was worth it. I also made some more sub charts and imported all the new pictures to Infinite Campus.

I had classes and small groups in the lab throughout the day. I think the small groups are part of the reason that my days feel non-stop this year. I'm kind of always on edge because I never really know when kids are coming in. I have some small groups scheduled in but there are also random other ones that just seem to show up. I'm not necessarily responsible for them but if they have problems I'm the one they ask. And I have to keep them in line if they appear to be going off task. Fun stuff.

I had my second grade literacy group for the first time today. The teacher has so many lower level kids this year, which is usually the group she takes, so she split them into two groups and I got one. It didn't go great today but most of that was my fault because I needed a refresher on long and short vowels. I was relying on the kids, who I already mentioned were the lower level kids, so who knows. The activity involved picking a small pictures, figuring out what word that picture was supposed to represent, and then writing that word in their vowel book. A book I actually made but that was last year and have since forgotten if long vowels say their name or short vowels. I think it's the long ones. That's what we were going with anyway. I'll do better next time.

I helped the other second grade teacher with an email issue where every time she emailed someone on her iPad she got a copy of her email in her inbox. Turns out in a recent update the option to do that was automatically checked. We figured it out and she asked if I drank pop or ate anything out of the vending machine. I said I did not so she just gave me fifty cents and it was pretty funny. I also maybe helped one of the kindergarten teachers with her iPad. I'll find out tomorrow if I remember to check in with her.

After work I had a haircut, which was at least a week overdue, and then I came home and did nothing. I ended up not working on my metadata crosswalk tonight because I had absolutely no motivation. It is really hard to have a full day of work and then come home and do more work. My motivation already sucks. I eventually managed to post a few times to the discussion threads in my academic library class. Earlier today I emailed the professor in my collection development class about the group assignment this week where one person did everything on Sunday. I didn't do it in a “throwing her under the bus” kind of way, just a “wondering what to do now” kind of way. She agreed with the suggestion of providing more detail and granularity. That still kind of sucks because it means everyone has to do more work than was initially required because of the over-eager posting of one person. Whatever.

Right now I'm watching a livestream of the closed beta for Star Wars: Battlefront. It is from EA and the Battlefield people but has a different feel than Battlefield. It has a much faster pace, for one, and seems more along the lines of Call of Duty but the deaths don't come as fast. I will probably never play it but it is fun to watch.

Now I'm going to go to bed. Tomorrow is an early release day so I should have plenty of time to work on my metadata crosswalk. In theory. The professor moved the due date from Friday to Sunday, so that makes me feel a little better. I would prefer to not push it to the weekend, though, because I still don't have a firm grasp on MARC and it's still going to require quite a bit of thought. So tomorrow. Things will happen.