Friday, April 15, 2016

April 14, 2016

 Today already seems so long ago. I didn't have any scheduled testing today but one of the third grade teachers found me at the beginning of school talking to the librarian and wanted to send our very thorough third grade friend. It took me awhile to get the access codes but I went and picked up the kid and she spent the next two hours testing. And because why not, the teacher sent her back after lunch to continue testing. She got lucky and didn't have a four stage of Math. Or so we thought. The principal sent me an email after work saying that when a test is reactivated in the third stage it can take up to a day for the four stage to show up. I have lost track of how many kids we reactivated on the third stage and then assumed they didn't have a fourth stage. There is still a chance they don't have a fourth stage but they'll have to log back in so we can find out. If this third grader ends up having a stage four then that is at least another four hours of testing to look forward to. Along with the sixth grader who also takes her time. Just when I thought it was over.

The third grader was on a role with her Reading test but then slowly but surely lost that momentum. It took her at least thirty minutes, probably closer to forty-five or maybe even an hour, to answer the final question. The second to last question was a short audio clip describing how to boil an egg. The last question was putting the five or six steps to boil an egg in order. That took her an absurd amount of time because rather than listening to the audio track and then quickly going to the next question and putting the steps in order, she decided to transcribe the audio clip. She opened up the notepad and listened to the audio over and over again, slowly copying it down. It was incredible. I kept trying to get her to move on and eventually got her to just look back at the last question and see if she could at least put some of the steps in order with what she had written so far. And she was able to do the whole thing because it was super simple and she had listened to the audio clip god knows how many times. Painful.

This afternoon was the kindergarten performance. It involved a bedtime theme so they were all wearing their pajamas today, which is always cute. Add in attempts at dancing and choreography and it is adorable.

There was supposed to be another test in the lab this afternoon, not a state assessment, but it didn't happen because the test wouldn't load. At first I was annoyed because the lady showed up two hours early to set up the test, and if the test was working that would have been way too early. But then the test was broken. The lady called tech support and got an international center with a poor connection and a lady wasn't quite proficient in English. It was a painful conversation to listen to, much like watching a third grader take a test. The test lady repeatedly asked to speak to someone higher up because along with not being able to understand what was being said, the lady on the phone kept repeating the same possible fixes that weren't an issue. The test lady was eventually passed on but then gave the phone to me because she thought I would be able to follow what the new guy was saying. I was able to but could only do so much because I wasn't familiar with the test and I didn't have high enough administrative privileges to do some of what he was asking. After an hour of messing with it the lady had to cancel the test. She eventually had her tech guy come, and then got the testing tech guy back on the phone and had them talk. Her tech guy is a super loud phone talker. He was sitting six feet away from me and it was really tempting to cover my ears but I thought that might be rude. My mom told me latter that at one point he was a coach, which makes sense. I think in the end things were figured out at another school so the lady came back and rescheduled the test in two weeks. Can't wait.

After work I went and picked up the second attempt at framing the dwarf librarian drawing. It looked much better. And it was awkward because I was being helped by another woman but the woman who didn't do a good job the first time was right there. She said a few words to the other woman but didn't even make eye contact with me. Awkward. But the drawing looks good now. I sent a picture to the guy who drew it, telling him it was going on my desk when I got my first library job and that if I ever wrote a children's book he was definitely going to be the illustrator. He really liked how it looked in the frame and said I had his number whenever I came up with a book idea.

My first new pair of Chucks came today. The light-ish green ones with the light brown laces that look professional. I like them. Soon, maybe early next week, my other two pairs should arrive. Exciting times.

At work I did some research and came up with the electronic resource I wanted to post about for this week's discussion post. I was able to write that up and post it before dinner. Or maybe it was slightly after dinner. Probably that one.

Also at work I had enough time to edit my video tutorial script and when I did the math I shaved off about a minute. When I got home and actually read through it I was actually down to five minutes and forty seconds. That excludes the conclusion I still need to come up with and the time-lapse. I spent a lot of time tonight figuring out the layout. Rather than worrying about putting a transparent box on the screen for the captions and potentially blocking stuff on screen, I decided I would raise the bottom of the browser up to show the black desktop and I can type the captions in there. I still have the example flyer on screen and the notepad below it. I need to come up with concrete objectives to put on the notepad so it's not just a random blank notepad on the screen.

After coming up with the layout I wanted I eventually decided on how I wanted to record the time-lapse. I wanted to figure out the overall layout first because originally I was going to record the time-lapse in that layout and it would look weird if I did it in a slightly different one. In the end I decided to make the browser full screen to record the time-lapse so it would be the main focus.

I recorded myself making the flyer and now I am working on speeding it up. I just finished rendering out the first pass which got me from around eighteen and a half minutes down to four and a half minutes. Right now I'm rendering it again to get it down to just over a minute. I won't know how fast I actually need to make it until I finish the rest of the video but I also want to make sure it doesn't look ridiculous going so fast. If it doesn't I'll have to rethink the rest of the video. I'll know shortly.


I've got my meeting with the academic librarian tomorrow about my possible practicum. I really hope that goes well because it would be nice to have that figured out so I knew for certain my class schedule was set for the summer. After that I kind of want to go buy jeans but we'll see. I would also like to get home from the meeting and get my video recorded. Having all Saturday to work on captions and editing would be nice.

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