April 1, 2016

 They blamed the failures in testing yesterday on too many people trying to take it during peak times. You know, when school is in session. They advised us to be aware of that but said we could continue testing. The principal sent out a revised testing schedule for the day and a minute later someone at another school sent out an email saying her school was immediately receiving all of the error messages from yesterday, while not testing at peak times. So the principal got on the intercom and told teachers to disregard her email and that we wouldn't be testing. Throughout the morning more emails came in of people trying to test and having no success. I love state assessments.

Without testing, my day went back to normal. I had several classes in the lab throughout the day and when I wasn't helping teachers with things, I researched copyright stuff and started writing one of my discussion posts for the week. It was interesting skimming through the 73-page article about mashups and I want to go back and read the whole thing when I have time. I learned that copyright doesn't cover live performances, which is why DJs can play all of their music with all of the samples that would often be considered copyright infringement and not only not get in trouble, but actually get paid for their performance. I also learned that people can pay a cover license, or whatever it's called, in order to make a cover of a song. They only have to pay for the songs they sell, which was pennies per song, so they don't have to worry about paying a huge amount to cover a song and then not sell any copies of their version and end up in the hole. I would say I got at least half of my post written, if not more, by the time I left work.

I left about thirty minutes early so I could head home and pack up all of my stuff before heading out of town. The trip went well and I only had to pass one person on the tail end of the first half of the trip. I was worried starting the second half because there was a big truck in front of me but he hauled ass so I didn't have to worry about it.

Class itself went well and we got out about twenty minutes early which was nice. After getting settled in my hotel room I was going to finish writing my discussion post about copyright and discovered that it hadn't saved to my computer. Normally when that happens I can just go to the Dropbox website and download it from there but my document had uploaded there either. I apparently didn't leave my computer at work on long enough for it to upload. Fantastic. I spent the next two hours re-writing my post from what I could remember and adding in other bits as I went. Some of it was probably better and some of it was probably worse. Oh well. It's done now.