April 26, 2016

 Last night I got nine hours of sleep and it was fantastic.

This morning I had one MAP test and it went well. There were several kids that weren't able to finish but they're going to finish up during their lab time later in the week. I think there are still a few kids in the building that need to finish their state assessments, which has to be done by Thursday. Thankfully I am not responsible for any of them.

I had regular classes in the lab throughout the day. In my downtime I nearly finished my part of the yearbook. I readjusted all the class page layouts, added in the kids who I had pictures of from the retakes (even though they are smaller and have a white background), added in the teacher portraits on each page, and added the teacher's name. There are three or four kids that I need to go take pictures of so I can edit them and add them to the yearbook. I also think we might be including the preschool, so I might throw in those pages tomorrow. If that ended up putting us over the budget we can just delete them later.

I also made a word flower thing for one of the kindergarten teacher using a simple kindergarten word list. It is like a Wordle but I don't think you can use specific images in Wordle so I used Tagxedo. I found a clipart picture of three flowers, edited it in Gimp to get one flower, uploaded it to Tagxedo, typed in the words I wanted, switched it so the original flower colors would be used, and then downloaded it. I wasn't that happy with the colors so after that I opened it in Gimp, erased the background, selected just the head of the flower, and used the Colorize option to shift the colors until they looked better. In the end I came up with several different color options. I printed off a black and white version from the copier and gave it to the teacher so she could see if it was what she wanted. She liked it so tomorrow I'll create a PDF with the different color options and send that to her.

During my lunch break I made a template for French-ruled (Seyes) paper in Excel. The lines are a little thicker than I would like because the cell borders only go so thin, but it doesn't look that bad. The measurements are also off slightly because Excel isn't accurate to the millimeter. It's close though. After working on that I found a website that had a Clairefontaine notebook cheaper than Goulet Pens and I could choose the color of the cover, so I decided to order it. But then there wasn't an “Add to Cart” button. I sent them an email and the first response came really quick. Unfortunately they just told me to click on the “Add to Cart” button. I emailed back saying it wasn't just grayed out, it wasn't on the page anywhere. They got back to me a little while later with a copy of the page that didn't allow the choosing of cover color but it did have an “Add to Cart” button.

When I got home I checked to see if they had updated the original page and they hadn't so I was just going to order it with the new page and request a color in the order notes. I made it to the ordering screen and it said it would update the shipping amount once I put my address in. But it didn't update. I tried a couple different things and it wouldn't show up. That's when I started having second thoughts. Or maybe third thoughts after the thing with the missing button. I searched for information about the website and there wasn't much there. They hadn't used Twitter since last year, which seemed odd. The website has a store but the main point of the website is to sell a subscription box that is supposed to come out every other month. On Facebook, which they also haven't used since last year, the last posts were people either wondering when they were going to get their box because it had been three months and one hadn't arrived, or people not getting what they had ordered and not hearing back from the company after they said on Facebook that someone would contact them. With all of that I decided not to risk it and didn't order the notebook from them. I'm sticking with Goulet Pens because they have a great social media presence, are active in their community, and I had a really good experience with my last order. A few bucks isn't worth the hassle, which seemed inevitable with that other website. I probably would have had to pay a ridiculous amount for shipping, anyway.

Going back to work. The weather was predicted to get bad near the end of the day and that came true. The last thirty minutes of school was filled with near constant all-calls from the office asking for kids to come to the office because their parents were there to pick them up. Nothing like that has happened before. I had planned on leaving as soon as the bell rang because the weather was only supposed to get worse but as I was about to turn my computer off there was an announcement for everyone to go to the basement, which is where the lab is. We were put under a tornado warning so everyone that was left at school had to follow our drill procedure and congregate in the basement. Luckily a lot of kids had already left but it was still a close fit and it does not take very long for it to get super hot down there. After fifteen minutes or so we opened up the music room and the work room and moved some kids into those rooms to spread the heat out a little bit. After about ten minutes of that my mom found me and said she was leaving to check on the dogs so I headed out, too. I learned later that the warning had expired a few minutes before I left but they were keeping everyone down there because they didn't know if another warning was going to come.

The drive home involved heavy rain and the occasional ping of tiny hail. Not long after getting home Tanner and Beau got into a bloody fight, which was great. I was standing up on the seat of the coat area right off the kitchen, looking for the weather radio, and they got into it right beneath me. I couldn't do anything but my mom was able to go grab the gate which we use to safely separate them, and I got Tanner corralled in the laundry room while my mom got Beau and Alfie outside. Both Tanner and Beau ended up bleeding everywhere but it didn't take too long for them to get over it, although there were occasional growls the rest of the night. I love dogs.

Nothing really ended up happening with the storm. Lots of rain, some small hail, and some big gusts of wind. In the lower parts of town I know the streets were flooding, because the drainage down there is horrible, but I haven't heard of anything other than that. It turned out better than expected overall. My mom was annoyed and thought it should have been treated like a snow day, especially considering we missed out on one of those earlier in the year. It makes sense because this storm was in the forecast since yesterday or the day before and it is potentially more dangerous than anything we would get on a snow day. Considering all of the schools had to use their tornado procedures at the end of the day and a bunch of parents at our school (and probably throughout the district) came to pick up their kids early, the superintendent is probably going to get a lot of angry phone calls and emails. With the snow day he sent out a kind of apology for not calling it when he should have. It will be interesting to see if anything happens this time.

After dinner tonight I managed to read a textbook chapter and an article. Not bad. I should be able to read the remaining three articles tomorrow. And start formulating my answer to the question for this week's discussion post.

I heard back from the librarian who I will be doing my practicum with this summer and she had a more formalized list of what activities and projects I would be working on this summer. I need to write those up and tie them to the outcomes of the program and send that to my adviser so she can approve of everything.

One of my group members commented on the price table I posted yesterday saying it looked good but I haven't heard from the other two. We're supposed to present next week some time and at least from my perspective we barely have anything done. The paper we have to write and the presentation combine to a little more than a quarter of our overall grade in the class. That is significant to say the least. I'm hoping everyone steps up this weekend, and in a timely enough fashion that they get me their slide information so I can make the PowerPoint and send that back out to them. The semester is almost over but with so many points still on the table we really can't afford to slack off. I think at the beginning of every group project we should have access to our group members' past grades so we can get a better idea of what kind of student they are. That way you don't put too much faith in the slackers.