Wednesday, May 25, 2016

May 24, 2016

 Today was the last full day of school. The librarian told me to get there early because they were having a breakfast for all the people who won't be back next year, and I am now included in that. My alarm went off at 5:55AM this morning with the song “Hot For Teacher”. I then turned it off and fell back to sleep until 7:15AM. So much for getting to work early. I did manage to leave the house about ten minutes earlier than usual so I did better than I thought I would.

Not too long after getting to work they made an announcement for the teachers and staff to go to the teacher's lounge. I was still finishing setting up the computer lab when the librarian and my mom came over to make sure I was going to the lounge. When I walked over a lot of the teachers and staff were already in the lounge and a lot of them started singing the graduation song. Then one of the paras pulled me over in front of everyone, the librarian said something nice about me. The para had hung up a piece of string and tied a bunch of pieces of paper to it with suggestions for life that she had written and that she was getting the other staff and teachers to write. That was pretty cool. And then the spotlight was off me and we all ate food.

I am hoping that tomorrow nothing will be brought up about me leaving at the assembly. They usually have the people who are leaving stand up and I wouldn't mind not standing. I'm not a fan of public recognition. And if anything is actually announced I might cry because I really like my job and don't want to quit. It's only the second job I've had but it is easily the best. I get to work with fun people who appreciate the work I do and I get to help kids. The only thing more I could ask for is decent pay, which I would never be able to get. And that sucks. So, if I could make it through tomorrow without crying that would be great. I think the entire school already knows I'm leaving so there is no need to announce it during the assembly, which I am counting on. The focus needs to be on the retiring sixth grade teacher.

To add a little more stress to me leaving the school, the tech guys were there today giving all the teachers new laptops. They also told me they were putting new computers in the lab next year. This means that none of the computers will have the shortcuts page I made, Type To Learn, Reading Counts, or the cool desktop backgrounds I made. Life will go on but it is annoying to know I won't be there to help sort things out.

Along with the new laptops today came multiple requests from teachers. One immediate issue for several of them was the wireless randomly losing connection. The fix seems to be manually disconnecting from the network and then connecting again. It's a problem that doesn't seem like it should be happening with brand new laptops. And it seems odd that it is happening with multiple laptops. It doesn't seem to be an isolated issue. Along with troubleshooting that I also helped teachers install Reading Counts and printers, and setup their email again.

I finished going through and cleaning up my work computer. I deleted most of the stuff on my desktop, cleaned up the Computer Lab folder on the faculty drive, and saved all the stuff I have made over the past four years to my Dropbox. I'm going to go over everything again tomorrow but my last step will be disconnecting Dropbox from the computer and deleting it.

Throughout the day I had most, if not all, of my regularly scheduled classes in the lab. That was unexpected for the last full day of the year but I didn't mind it. A last hurrah. The best part of this was one of the third grade classes that ended up coming to the lab at least twice today. The second time they got to have free time and several of them played a Snake-like game that I am not a fan of because it is open to the world and there are no filters one what other players can call themselves, and they occasionally call themselves inappropriate things. The kids were introduced to the game in Boys & Girls Club and I usually don't allow them to play it but because it was the last day and I didn't want to argue with them I let it go. Which is good because of a funny moment that occurred. There was a boy and girl sitting in front of me and at one point the girl called over to someone else playing the game and said that if they saw someone in their game named “Killer.Girl” it was her. Then the boy chimed in, completely seriously, that if they saw someone named “Bubbles”, it was him. I was very amused by this.

At the end of the day I went down and hung out in the library, from whatever time until about four o'clock. I talked with the librarian about stuff, showed her the slideshow, and put it on a couple different laptops for tomorrow. Then I went out in the hall for a little bit and talked to one of the first grade teachers and one of the fifth grade teachers. I had them, along with several other people throughout the day, sign their name in my autograph book. I started it a few years ago with my family and friends and thought it would be a good idea to get it back out. I still need to get more people to sign it tomorrow.

I want to give out some of my cloth bookmarks tomorrow so tonight I worked on finishing the ones I started however long ago but never finished. I made it through one but when I started on the second one the bobbin lost tension because it ran too low and it screwed things up. It took me forever to get all the string out from under the foot. Then I re-wound the bobbin and started on a different bookmark. I screwed up the tension on the bobbin and that screwed up the new bookmark. So I fixed the bobbin, correctly this time, and was able to finish four or five more bookmarks. That brought me up to twenty-three finished bookmarks, which should be plenty. Hopefully.


Now I need to go to bed because it is midnight and I don't need to oversleep on the last day of school.

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