April 13, 2016

 Today was a very quiet day at work. Work-wise, anyway. Literally speaking it was a very loud day because the drums have returned to the music room next door and the kids were beating the crap out of those all day. I love drums.

At the beginning of the day I needed to get the testing access codes from the principal and I was a little late in doing that. The kids go to the gym in the morning until their teachers come to pick them up. After all the other grades had left, the principal had both second grade classes circle up in the gym and she gave them a long talk, basically about how awful they are and that they need to stop. She presented it much better. But it took forever. And I don't think it worked.

When one of the classes came to the lab about an hour later, and then as they were leaving one of the kids got is jacket caught in the cord so when he picked his jacket off the ground and went to leave it pulled the headphone jack out of the computer tower and the headphones crashed to the ground. This also pulled his jacket out of his hands. He looked back, untangled his jacket, looked at the headphones, and then walked out. The teacher heard the noise and called him back in to pick up the headphones and asked him if he knew what happened. He said he didn't and the teacher was about to tell him to be more careful but then I ratted him out because of how deliberate he had been about not only nearly breaking the headphones and ignoring it, but then looking the teacher in the eyes and lying. And even though it was maybe two hours into the day, and they had started their day with the principal talking to them about being better people, lying about the headphones was this kid's third strike and he had to go up to the SPED room. At least one other second grader ended up in there and one spent some time in the office for pushing his classmates.

I discovered that last one when I went to clock in from lunch. I came into the office and the kid was sitting there and one of the office ladies was having a very serious conversation with him. She was telling him that every time he was sent to the office it was put on his permanent record and that record would follow him. Even into adulthood. She told him that when he was looking for jobs they would be able to see his permanent record and she asked if he thought someone would want to give him a job if they saw on his record that he pushed his friends in line. It was great. Throughout the day I saw this kid three times and each time he was crying. He was not having a good day.

I ended up not having any testing in the lab today. My third grade friend came back for the last hour of the day and she managed to answer five questions. She worked on the first question for over twenty minutes and in the end she didn't even answer it. She flagged it to come back to it later. She also spent a lot of time creating a multiplication chart. When I looked at it after she left I noticed that she had started her first row in the first cell, instead of offsetting it one to the right. It looked like her multiplication was correct but if she was working from the first row and first column, that math wouldn't line up. It's hard to explain, but she put so much time into it and it was just slightly off. It is painful watching her but at least she is actually working at it the whole time, even if she is taking the scenic route of the scenic route's scenic route.

Without testing, I had three classes in the lab this morning and one class this afternoon. That left a lot of time with nothing work-related to do. I found a song online for one of the cooks. Her dad recently passed away and it was his favorite song. She would listen to it whenever she was sad and it still makes her happy. The only thing she could find was an old YouTube video but I was able to find the actual song and sent it to her.

The rest of my day was spent working on my video tutorial script I made it to the conclusion but didn't have time to write it. I went with the idea of describing and demonstrating the various aspects of the website and then set it up for a time-lapse of making the library flyer. When I got home I was able to read it straight through at a decent clip and it came out a couple three seconds over seven minutes. That didn't include a possible brief title slide, the time-lapse, a conclusion, and actually clicking around the website. The whole thing is only supposed to be five to seven minutes. Good grief. I need to talk less and show more I guess. This is shaping up to be a very stressful weekend.

Chipotle was good tonight and the videos went well. After dinner I read an article for class and thought about my tutorial. I also got briefly distracted by thinking about serendipitous discovery. Along with starting a tool library I want to do things with serendipitous discovery. I want to be done with school already so I can work on that. My ideas for it involve expanding my small bit of programming knowledge, which is not something I can dive into on top of schoolwork. I hope I am still interested in it when it is no longer just a distraction from schoolwork.

Now I'm going to go to bed because I'm tired. Tomorrow I want to come up with truncated script. I'm not even going to pretend like I'll get around to recording the video. I just want to have a script that I can work with on Friday when I do record the video. I would also like to read my second article for the week and write my discussion post. I looked and it isn't much of a discussion post this week. We have to pick a resource and find two instructional materials for that resource and then write a short post about how and why we picked it. Should be a piece of cake if I pick a popular enough resource. Famous last words. If I could knock that out tomorrow then I could focus fully on the video tutorial. That would be great.