January 28, 2016

 I got a new Old Spice soap called Timber and I was hoping for more of a cedar vibe. Instead it reminds me of pina colada. Apparently the timber to which they were referring is a coconut tree.

I think I may have had some stuff to write about but I can guarantee I have forgotten about most of it by now. Anyway, moving on.

Throughout the day I had kids in the lab finishing MAP tests. There are only two kids left to finish, at least of those who test in the lab. Technically there are three if you include the sixth grader who takes a really long time to finish, but after speaking with her, her teacher made the decision not to make her finish her Math test. Yesterday she took an hour to answer six questions and today, after finishing her Reading test, she spent about half an hour to forty-five minutes answering six more Math questions. At that rate it would have taken her at least another five hours to finish, and that would have to happen tomorrow. She gets good scores on the tests but it doesn't really see worth it if it takes so long to get them. And when she gets up to the really important tests, like the ACT or SAT, she's not going to have six hours to take them. I hope she can get things figured out by high school.

When I wasn't watching kids test, I worked on spreadsheets and figured out how to make a scatter plot in Excel for one of the sixth grader's science fair project. Always a good skill to have.

One of the more annoying second graders came into the lab to work on Compass Learning and unfortunately we weren't testing at the time so I had to let him come in. He's always trying to avoid work and today's method involved writing me notes. It started with “You are nice form [his name]”. He never quite got the hang of “from”. Later on he asked me something about being sarcastic. I replied that I didn't know what sarcasm was, which seemed to fully confuse him. Then I tried to explain that I was being sarcastic when I said I didn't know what sarcasm was. This confused him even more because I'm not entirely sure he knew was sarcasm meant. My response also led to another note, “that is not nice can you be nice??? pleseeeeeus”. By the time he left he gave me a third note, just like the first, including a 'form' instead of a 'from'. At least we're still friends.

When I got home from work I watched the class meeting video from last night. I will say I didn't really miss much because at the moment I can't really remember what was in the video. Probably not a good sign. After I finished the video I tried to find a third technology resource for my discussion post for that class. Two can come from the list in the book but the third has to be one we find on our own. I found a couple I really liked but when I checked back with the book they were in the list. Good grief. From a learning perspective I appreciate how thorough the list is but when it comes to finding my own resource I kind of feel like the author is an asshole for being so thorough.

After dinner I worked on my discussion post for my other class, which involved researching and writing about NewsBank. I am thoroughly impressed with their service offerings. At least their descriptions of those services. The university has a subscription to some of them and I got lost for awhile reading random articles. I would be interested in trying out some of their other offerings. Particularly their sites for kids that are supposed to align with the curriculum and state standards while presenting an appealing site that keeps kids interested. I'm intrigued. In my post I ended up adding a lot of links throughout instead of doing regular APA in-text citations. I got on a roll with this and ended up linking to the Wikipedia article for sliced bread (because I said it seemed like the best thing since sliced bread) and I linked to a K-Pop music video (because I referenced the fact that I hadn't heard of NewsBank before and it seemed like a music video with millions of views for a band you have never heard of before). I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Or at least the fact that I could include some very random links.

Thanks to the K-Pop tangent I have been watching K-Pop music videos for the past forty-five minutes. I can't complain because they are endlessly entertaining and the music is incredibly catchy. But we're coming up on midnight and I need to go to bed. Tomorrow is Friday and I am looking forward to the weekend.