February 29, 2016

Today is a Leap Day but it didn't feel any different than any other Monday. We didn't have any testing today so that was a nice change. I was pretty active this morning which made it disappear, quite the opposite of standing and watching kids test for hours.

This morning I went and showed the ridiculous book I got at the book sale to the librarian and one of the paras, who thought it was great. While there one of the sixth grade teachers brought me his laptop because he had been contacted by one of the IT guys who told him he had something on his laptop that he needed to remove. The sixth grade teacher's adopted son has a tendency to download things and it appears doesn't know to check the source of the download or to look for add-ons that sneakily download themselves along with the the program you want. I ended up deleting a bunch of stuff, including a lot of registry stuff, but never came across the thing the IT guy mentioned. So we'll see.

I finished that up just in time to go down and help with literacy centers in kindergarten. I had to figure out a cassette tape and was flummoxed. I have always been confused about which side is which. When I put it in the player is the side facing out the side that is playing or is it the side facing in? I can never remember. But I do know how to work a tape player. I still couldn't get the tape to play and it ended up taking the teacher coming over and noticing the Pause button was down. I completely missed that. I didn't even know there was a Pause button. I do now though, so there's that.

From there I went down to one of the third grade rooms to look at the projector. I lost track of how many trips I made back and forth between there and the library. The ceiling projector had an orange blinking light next to the lamp symbol but it was still working. But only when plugged directly into a laptop. Normally it is plugged into the overhead projector thing and the laptop is connected to that, so the teacher can swap between projecting the laptop or the overhead. It seems that the overhead is malfunctioning but the blinking light on the projector is also a problem I put in a trouble ticket for the projector because someone is coming tomorrow to look at the fourth grade projector (which continued to not work after I cleaned it out).

After working on the projector I stayed in the room so I could set up all the iPads in the iPad cart for state assessments. Originally only one class for sure wanted to test on the iPads with another willing to try it if the first class went well. Now several more are interested so along with the one iPad cart I set up initially, the principal wanted me to set up two more carts. One more to go.

All that took me up to lunch. After lunch I had three classes and a small group of second graders. I sent the second graders back five minutes early because they wouldn't stop talking. Normally I wouldn't have cared but I had warned them twice and told them if they continued I would send them back. Those second grade groups have caused me a lot of grief throughout the year. They are supposed to be working independently without need of my supervision, but they're still second graders.

After work I didn't accomplish much and then I made pasta for dinner. After dinner I read two articles. The first one was read while sitting on the elliptical and peddling. The second one I read at my computer with a minor nap in the middle of it because reading about licensing can be interesting but also boring. I managed to finish it, which leaves me with one more article to read this week. Along with the group project on image databases and the paper on databases. And possibly something else or two that I am forgetting at the moment. I would like to fast forward to all that stuff being done. Mainly because I haven't started working on either and the stress is creeping up.

Tomorrow there will be testing and then probably normal day stuff. After work I have a meeting with the PR person at the public library to see about volunteering there. Hopefully that goes well. There is no reason to think it won't but I don't really know what to expect. She asked me on the phone what I was what I wanted to do and I didn't know. It is kind of the same thing with the practicum I want to do. I don't have any library experience so I want to do a practicum to see what I like, but I have to do the practicum in a specific area, so I have to know what area I want to work in. It's like going to school to get a job and then the job requires work experience, which you don't have because you were going to school. For the volunteering thing, I honestly don't know what my options are, so I think that is what we'll be discussing tomorrow. Even if I'm just shelving books I would be fine with it but it would be cool if they had something that would give me more practical experience.