July 21, 2016

This morning I woke up early so I could get to campus for a meeting at 8:30AM. We talked about our calibrated data and made it through about half of our results before the other librarian had to leave to go to another meeting. I think on all of them that we did together at least two of us picked the same number each time, so that was a good sign that we were on the same page. For the ones where our answers differed it was either because the other person missed something or they had a different way of interpreting the rubric. To help with that we took the time to write out a detailed description for what each score on each part of the rubric meant. That way we don't have to try and interpret the rubric and the students' answers, we just match it up and move on.

When I got home from the meeting I did the math and figured out how many responses each of us would have to grade and which ones we would be grading. Overall we each have to grade 163 responses. For the first set my supervisor and the other librarian will grade 95 and I'll grade 94. For the second set they will grade 68 and I'll grade 69. It worked out really nicely that we can all grade the same amount. It is, however, going to take forever to grade all of those responses. Can't wait.

I went in to work at noon today. And I did things. I finished making a personalized reading list, I updated my homebound spreadsheets with the comments I got back from a couple of my patrons, I answered a couple chat questions, responded to a couple emails, typed up more of my conference journal, and used my stern voice to talk to a teenager who was bugging another kid.

She came over and told us he was shooting rubber bands at her. I went to talk to him and asked if he was doing that and he said he had rubber bands but he wasn't shooting them so she was a liar. I asked if he had been shooting anything and he admitted to shooting paper at her, so there's that. I asked if he was going to stop and his smart remark was “that's why you came over here isn't it?” So I responded with “is it?” I asked if he was going to stop and he made another smart remark so I just asked him if that was a “yes” and stood there until he said it was. I had to go over one more time when the girl's sister came over to say the boy and his friend were now taking pictures of them. They claimed they weren't and showed me their phones, which doesn't really mean much because I didn't want to see their phones and it doesn't take that long to delete pictures.

Other events of the evening. One of the elevators briefly broke. I don't know how it happened but the door was stuck open on the first floor and there was a high pitched buzzing noise. The library director was there tonight for some reason so she and I and the assistant manager of circulation all tried to figure out. We eventually had the maintenance guy turn off the power to it and when it was turned back on, everything seemed to work. Just like when a computer is acting up. Also, at the very end of the evening I checked the men's room and found a stack of paperback books in the corner of the handicap stall. A stack at least two feet tall. That's a lot of books to just be hanging out in the bathroom. Kids are idiots. Maybe they should try reading a book rather than stacking them.

There is construction on the main road I take to and from work. It is a split four lane road and one of the lanes is closed. This has led to decent delays with lines backing up at the stoplight at least a half a mile. Maybe more. I'm not good with judging distances like that. Either way, cars are getting backed up. On my way home for dinner there was a six car fender-bender on the one-lane side. Two cars were a little bit ahead but the other four were all stuck together. It looked like the cops had only just arrived because they hadn't figured out how to direct traffic yet so the line of cars on that side of the road had to have been backed up close to a mile (I just looked at a map and did some math so that is accurate). I doubted that would be cleared up any time soon so when I left to go back to work I decided to go through town instead. A great idea in theory but it seemed like the cops were either now directing people that way or they were choosing it on their own to go around the accident. I ended up get stuck at the top of an off ramp and I have never seem that many cars on that off ramp. That alone made me a couple minutes late getting back to work, which was annoying.

Now I'm going to go to bed because it is late and I have to open in the morning, which means I have to wake up early. Hooray. The only good thing is that I'll get off at five o'clock. But then I have to spend the rest of the night writing blog posts because I have not done that yet. I doubt I finish either of them but if I could at least get a decent start I would be happy.