October 7, 2015

 The metadata crosswalk assignment is frying my brain. More on that later.

Today at work I continued to do things. I emailed student pictures to someone at the central kitchen so they can be added into their system. We usually send over the CD that we get but this year we didn't get a CD so I talked to the cook at school to see what information the central kitchen actually needed. She wasn't sure so she gave me the name of the lady at the central kitchen so I sent her an email to see if she needed the pictures named with the student number or with the students' names or something else entirely. And just in case I attached all of the pictures named with the student number, which is apparently what she needed because she just emailed back a thank you.

I came close to finishing my spreadsheets for this round of testing. And I probably would have but I had classes in the lab almost all day, and it was an early release day. The day flew by really. And my brain is currently fried so I am having trouble coming up with things to write.

One funny moment that I can remember is when a second grader came down to get help with is laptop. We were standing near the doors of the lab, which were open, and the art teacher walked by to go to her small art closet across the hall. Out of nowhere the kid says “You changed your hair.” The art teacher replied that she had and the kid responded with “It's nice.” And the art teacher after a short pause, thanked him. Written out it sounds like nothing worth mentioning but it was just so odd. The kid is kind of a pain in the butt, so there's that, but he also sounded like a mobster in a movie giving a compliment. It's hard to convey. It was just odd.

After work I went and got gas and cleaned my windshield while I waited. Then I went over and finally got the book cross stitch I made last year framed. I meant to give it to the school librarian last year, but never got around to it and then didn't want to spend the money so late in the year with summer approaching. I finally took notice of it in my closet last week and I knew the librarian's birthday was sometime this month so I decided to get it framed today when I would have a little extra time. I'm interested to see how it turns out. Also, when I got home later I had an email that said the librarian's birthday is next Thursday. And I will be picking up the framed cross stitch next Wednesday. Perfect timing.

Next I stopped by the gas station to get my Powerball ticket before going to Target. I ended up running into my mom there, which was unexpected, so I ended up walking around with her while she finished her shopping. I also forgot to buy baby carrots.

I went home for awhile before going back out to pick up Chipotle. It ended up being an alright burrito. Hopefully the second half will be better. After dinner I showed some good videos, including several educational ones that involved vision and perception.

The rest of my night was spent fighting my lack of motivation and trying to figure out my metadata crosswalk. It is mildly overwhelming. Not because of the amount of work but because I feeling woefully unprepared for the activity. I have never worked in a library and haven't taken a cataloging class. This assignment is my first time actually looking at a MARC record, a very confusing one that isn't formatted very well in the Word document. So rather than this being an assignment about converting MARC to Dublin Core, it is more like trying to translate one language I don't speak into another language I don't speak. I'm having to learn all the minute details about MARC in order to figure out if it will map over to Dublin Core. And that involves a whole other level of interpretation. And all of the frustration that comes from being completely out of my depth and lost and everything else has dropped my already low motivation to practically negative levels. It's a struggle right now.

Regarding my other struggle, the group work for this week, apparently my group wasn't the only one that got completely boned by a eager early posters. I know this because the professor took the time to record a short video explaining what the other group members could do if all the information from the case study had been done. And that is to basically to a lot of freaking extra work that wouldn't have been necessary if the early posters weren't unintentionally selfish assholes. Not to be rude.

Now I'm going to go to bed. My goal every day has been to finish my metadata crosswalk and that hasn't happened yet so I'm bumping it to tomorrow. I need to just suck it up and finish it. Stop over thinking it (or more accurately over thinking about my lack of knowledge) and just do it. So that's on the agenda for tomorrow. When I will once again be tired, because it is late now, and unmotivated. Sounds like a winning combo.

October 6, 2015

 My work days have been so filled with work lately. It's both good and bad. Today I had several different small projects going at the same time and I kept pausing one thing to do another. It was mildly hectic but I got things done. I exported data about the school pictures so I could import it into Excel, format it, cut and paste it into Notepad, save it as a .bat file, and run it in order to rename all the pictures, in bulk, from the student number to the student name. It was a bit of a process but I figured it out last year or the year before and it saves me a hell of a lot of time. It took me for-freaking-ever to figure it all out in the first place but not having to individually rename 350 pictures was worth it. I also made some more sub charts and imported all the new pictures to Infinite Campus.

I had classes and small groups in the lab throughout the day. I think the small groups are part of the reason that my days feel non-stop this year. I'm kind of always on edge because I never really know when kids are coming in. I have some small groups scheduled in but there are also random other ones that just seem to show up. I'm not necessarily responsible for them but if they have problems I'm the one they ask. And I have to keep them in line if they appear to be going off task. Fun stuff.

I had my second grade literacy group for the first time today. The teacher has so many lower level kids this year, which is usually the group she takes, so she split them into two groups and I got one. It didn't go great today but most of that was my fault because I needed a refresher on long and short vowels. I was relying on the kids, who I already mentioned were the lower level kids, so who knows. The activity involved picking a small pictures, figuring out what word that picture was supposed to represent, and then writing that word in their vowel book. A book I actually made but that was last year and have since forgotten if long vowels say their name or short vowels. I think it's the long ones. That's what we were going with anyway. I'll do better next time.

I helped the other second grade teacher with an email issue where every time she emailed someone on her iPad she got a copy of her email in her inbox. Turns out in a recent update the option to do that was automatically checked. We figured it out and she asked if I drank pop or ate anything out of the vending machine. I said I did not so she just gave me fifty cents and it was pretty funny. I also maybe helped one of the kindergarten teachers with her iPad. I'll find out tomorrow if I remember to check in with her.

After work I had a haircut, which was at least a week overdue, and then I came home and did nothing. I ended up not working on my metadata crosswalk tonight because I had absolutely no motivation. It is really hard to have a full day of work and then come home and do more work. My motivation already sucks. I eventually managed to post a few times to the discussion threads in my academic library class. Earlier today I emailed the professor in my collection development class about the group assignment this week where one person did everything on Sunday. I didn't do it in a “throwing her under the bus” kind of way, just a “wondering what to do now” kind of way. She agreed with the suggestion of providing more detail and granularity. That still kind of sucks because it means everyone has to do more work than was initially required because of the over-eager posting of one person. Whatever.

Right now I'm watching a livestream of the closed beta for Star Wars: Battlefront. It is from EA and the Battlefield people but has a different feel than Battlefield. It has a much faster pace, for one, and seems more along the lines of Call of Duty but the deaths don't come as fast. I will probably never play it but it is fun to watch.

Now I'm going to go to bed. Tomorrow is an early release day so I should have plenty of time to work on my metadata crosswalk. In theory. The professor moved the due date from Friday to Sunday, so that makes me feel a little better. I would prefer to not push it to the weekend, though, because I still don't have a firm grasp on MARC and it's still going to require quite a bit of thought. So tomorrow. Things will happen.

October 5, 2015

 This morning I helped out in both kindergarten rooms for literacy centers. I might end up with a cold tomorrow because I got coughed on several times. But the kids were mostly well-behaved, so it could have been worse.

I printed off MAP reports today and gave them to the teachers. All except for one that I'm still waiting on for a score to be deleted. It is one of those tricky ones where the kid went so fast that a score doesn't show up on screen and they have to take the test again. But in reality they do get a score and it shows up in their overall score instead of the score they got the second time. It is annoying. I'm still working on my spreadsheets. I finished the main page but I also have a second page that shows the change from the previous test. I will get that to the teachers eventually.

This year instead of getting a CD with the school pictures on it we got a website where we can go and download the pictures. So that is what I did today. I would have preferred the CD because on the website you have to download a zip file with the picture software and all the pictures, which is exactly what the CD has, but it doesn't take as long to download. Whatever. Also annoying, is the fact that you can't get the hi-res pictures from the website, like we need for the yearbook, you still have to contact them and have them send you a CD with the hi-res pictures. I imagine the main reason for not having them on the site would be the increased bandwidth from downloading them. But they aren't huge pictures so it is still kind of ridiculous. Anyway, I downloaded all the stuff and made sub charts for the teachers, which is just a page with all the kids' pictures and names that a teacher can leave in their sub plans so a substitute can put a name and face together. Tomorrow I might make some for some of the other, non-classroom teachers in the building, like SPED and resource.

When I got home I checked on the group discussion thing for this week that involves us answering the questions from a case study in one of our books, in the form of a wiki page that we all add to throughout the week. Well, I ended up with the largest group with thirteen people, out of a class of thirty I think, and one of those people is a huge overachiever. To the point that over the course of five edits yesterday she pretty much finished the entire assignment. It is mildly frustrating to say the least. We are being graded like we would for a discussion post, so multiple posts throughout the week. If one person fulfills all the requirements for the assignment, the day before the week even starts, where does that leave the other twelve people in the group. Selfish is a word that comes to mind but I think that insinuates malicious intent, which is not the case with this classmate. She's just very on the ball. To the detriment of everyone else in her group in this case. I managed to squeeze a couple, very tiny things in tonight but it certainly won't put much of a dent in the twelve points I need for the week. If no one else speaks up I might send an email to the professor just to see if there is something else we can do in addition to what is asked for in the case study to actually give the rest of the group a chance at participation. Maybe treat it like an Etch-a-Sketch, now that it's all done we can shake it clear and let everyone else have a go. Especially considering most people don't even start posting on the discussions until Wednesday at the earliest and this was done on Sunday. We'll see what happens.

Tonight I went to a comedy show and it was hilarious. The first opening act was really good and the next two had their moments. The headliner was worth the price of admission, though. He added in a bunch of new stuff and he was just as funny all of his TV specials. He definitely deserves all of his success because he is such a good storyteller. Because of the new material they really harped on the use of cellphones. They went on and on about if you were caught with a phone you would be kicked out. I didn't see this happen to anyone but all the roving security were probably enough to scare people from trying. Each aisle had two people walking up and down the entire time, non-stop. There were also people near the exit doors and a bunch of people roaming around the floor seating. It was kind of incredible.

The best part of the show was probably the fact that we started out in row 32, which is two or three rows from the top, and ended up getting moved down to row 6 because they were trying to fill in the more expensive seats that didn't sell. Those seats were $16 more per ticket, so that's a decent amount of money. And rather than shift everyone down they started at the back and started sending rows down at a time. I kind of liked that we were near the top and didn't have to walk all the way down the stairs, but then we did, and we were way better for it. I don't think we would have been able to hear as well from where we were originally. The funny part was that there were at least a couple groups of people a few rows in front of us who had moved down several rows already when it got closer to the start time and they were filling up. Then all the rows at the back, including the ones these people were originally sitting in, got moved down all the way to the front. If only they had waited.

I was reminded today that the last day for my metadata class is on Friday. Which is great news but it also means that my metadata crosswalk assignment is due on Friday, not Sunday like most of our assignments. Yikes. I'm glad I got a start on it this weekend but I really could have used another weekend. It doesn't help that I didn't get to work on it at all tonight, though I do not regret my decision to take the night off, regardless of how things turn out. I'll just need to put in some late nights this week. Hooray.

October 4, 2015

 I did productive things today. I worked on my metadata crosswalk a bit. I still don't like MARC although this is only the second time I have worked with it. The first time being yesterday. It looks like someone with poor fine motor skills tried their hand at typing and failed miserably as they just slammed their hands on the keyboard.

I also read three textbook chapters and responded to two discussion posts. I'm now kind of ready for the week to come. I still have more reading to do but I'm closer than I was yesterday. Most of my week will probably be devoted to my metadata crosswalk and the week-long group activity for my collection development class, which we have in lieu of a regular discussion. Hooray for group work.

I replaced the batteries in the smoke detectors today because a few days ago one started beeping in the middle of the night and another one started beeping yesterday morning. We're hoping this was due to dead batteries and not defective detectors. Interestingly, all but one of the detectors required a 'D' battery. The 'D' battery thing is normal, the interesting thing is that one of the detectors, even though it looks just like all the other ones, requires two 'AA' batteries.

I tried messing with the fifth grade teacher's flash drive again but didn't make any progress. It is time to throw in the towel, at least for me. It either needs some soldering that isn't being accomplished by holding the connections back together or it truly is damaged beyond repair.

Having spent most of my day doing schoolwork, I spent an hour playing Minecraft after I finish reading the third textbook chapter of the day. I built my first set of rails leading to my barn, which is probably the closest destination. This also involved building a small station near the barn which I think turned out really well. I built it correctly the first time and that surprised me a little. I also made it look pretty cool. I would like reuse the design for all the small stations I end up building so there is a sense of continuity. The next track will go to my Nether portal and that will be a much more involved project because it is far away and there will be some bends. The one plus is that I'm doing it in creative mode because I don't have the time to do it legit. I don't really have the time to be doing it in creative mode either, but if I went with survival I'd still be digging in a mine looking for red stone and iron. Which actually sounds like fun but school comes first. Unfortunately.

I don't know what the week has in store for me in terms of work. I imagine the same old stuff but only time will tell.

October 3, 2015

 I'm not going to have much to write about today, which will be a nice change for October so far. I woke up early but didn't really do much other than watch YouTube videos for the first couple of hours. Then, before lunch, I wrote a discussion post for one of my classes.

After lunch I took a nap. I was kind of tired but I didn't really need a nap. But I also didn't want to do any schoolwork so I crawled under my desk and listened to music until I fell asleep. After dinner I responded to a few discussion posts in my metadata class and did laundry. Sometime after that I started working on the final metadata project. It involved making a metadata crosswalk for a MARC record, turning it into a Dublin Core record. It is going to be a pain in the butt because MARC records look confusing as hell. I've never worked in a library and I haven't had a cataloging class so I have zero experience with reading MARC records. I'm going to need to do a lot of learning really quick. Yay.

I finally got a grade on my late metadata assignment and I lost 4.5 points. That drops me down to an 'A-'. Then a grade came out for one of the discussion posts and I missed a point, which dropped me to an even lower 'A-'. Now, if I get perfect scores on everything left for the class, which is doubtful, I would be at 95.9% in the class, and 96% is an 'A'. I think it should be 95% but what do I know. I think the goal now is just to maintain the 'A-' and hope I don't screw anything else up. I think maybe if I did get a perfect score on the remaining assignments she might give me the 0.1% to knock me up to an 'A' but I don't think it will come to that.

I ended my day with some Minecraft because it has been on my mind a lot recently. Earlier in the day I found a minecart station tutorial on YouTube, which is what I wanted to build in the latest basement in my house. Luckily the basement I carved out yesterday was pretty much the exact size I needed to build the station. But with that small margin for error I loaded up a flatland world first and built the whole station there just to make sure everything would work. This was good because I had room to move around and I ended up having to troubleshoot a few things that would probably have been more frustrating in the basement. When I switched over to my other world the whole process went much better having already worked through the build once. I also had room above it so I put in a glass ceiling and made stairs leading up to the top so I could walk around and see all the redstone and tracks. I really don't have the slightest clue how most of it works but it is pretty ingenious and works way better than anything I could have come up with. The station also had seven separate tracks so I have room to grow. I've got ideas for three or four of them but I could probably easily use all seven eventually.

Now it is late, so I'm going to go to bed. Tomorrow I need to work on school stuff. I'm ready for December.

October 2, 2015

 I did a lot of things today but hopefully I don't go into too much detail because it is late and I am tired.

Here are the things I remember. I scanned pictures for one of the second grade teachers of her kids so she could print them out and put them in a time capsule. Originally she took pictures with her phone and asked if I could help get them off. I still had the second kindergarten class pictures to edit so I was a little wary of agreeing to another editing project so I asked if she had the sheets of sticker pictures that each teacher gets that has four or five small pictures of each kid. She did, so I told her I'd scan those and see what she thought. This did involve a bit of editing but it was a lot easier than individually editing twenty-five pictures. She ended up liking it, so that was good.

I finished remaking the Lexile color chart for the library this morning and I set up the smart board for the ELL office in the back of the computer lab. The librarian found the cord for it last night so I got everything connected, downloaded and registered software, and set up the projector.

A fourth grader brought down a laptop that no one in her class was able to log into. Based on the error message I thought the hard drive might have run out of room to create new profiles. When this happens to the computer in the lab with the small hard drive I am able to go in and delete profiles. The problem with the laptop was that I didn't have a profile on the laptop already so I couldn't log in as myself. I tried several different students in the class, along with several different students from the teacher's class last year, but didn't manage to find one who had already used the computer. After a lot of research and failed attempts, I finally managed to log into the computer in Safe Mode, which gave me access to the user list and I was able to delete most of them. The hard drive was down to 49MB so I was fairly confident that was the problem.

The next problem was that in Safe Mode there apparently isn't a Recycle Bin and after deleting all those users, the hard drive space actually went down to 15MB instead of giving me more space. After even more research I found out where the Recycle Bin was located, in a hidden folder, which contained hidden files, for each of the recycle bins for all of the users. I was able to navigate to it in Safe Mode, find the one that most likely belonged to the Safe Mode profile based on the date of activity, and I was able to delete everything for good, bringing the hard drive up to 2.78GB of free space. It still seems like there is too much stored on it, somewhere, and I don't know how much space student profiles take up. Hopefully not a lot.

I fixed one of the sixth grade teacher's laptops by turning it off and on again. It was tricky though because the off button wasn't working. It also had a bunch of random lights that kept flashing and I had no idea why. It was an odd looking laptop. After the power button wouldn't work I tried pulling out the battery but the latches got stuck and I couldn't get the battery out. I was finally able to shut the laptop down by holding down the power button along with another button that I had no idea what it was for but it looked important. And that turned out to be a true because the laptop shutdown and when I turned it back on, everything worked.

There was a break in the day for an assembly this afternoon that was about storytelling. It was basically African fables about a spider and the origins of stories. It was interesting, and funny at times, but definitely geared toward younger children.

When the fifth grade teacher came to the lab this afternoon with her class she also brought her broken flash drive. I tried a couple different things that didn't work so I finally suggested taking it out of its case to see if anything was obviously wrong. It was kind of hard getting the case open but when I did I saw that two of the four little prongs had come unsoldered from the board. I have a soldering gun but it isn't made for such precise work and I don't have the necessary skills even if it was the right tool.

Before the teacher left the lab I had the idea of plugging it into a USB extension cord so I could play with it and not worry about it getting stuck in the computer. I went down to the library after her class left to see if the librarian happened to have an extension cord. And she did. I looked through cabinets but she ended up finding one after quite a bit of searching in her closet. I was kind of surprised.

I went back to the lab, plugged it in, plugged the flash drive into it, and then used my small pliers to push down both of the unsoldered pins to the board. After a bit of messing around I got the sound of something being plugged into the computer. It said the driver failed to install but I couldn't actually looking into it further because both of my hands were occupied.

School had ended about five minutes earlier so most of the teachers were still standing out front. I went and told the teacher that I had managed to get a sound but needed another set of hands. She got excited by the sound part so she came down and we spent quite a bit of time trying to get the flash drive to work. I held it in place while I told her what to do on the computer. Nothing ended up working though. We tried everything I could think of as well as everything we could find online. And we did that on my computer, her laptop, and another laptop she had borrowed from the library. It was kind of frustrating.

Tonight I managed to prop the flash drive up with another flash drive so I could push the pins down with the pliers with one hand and tried several more things but nothing worked. At one point I think I saw a faint red flicker of light on the flash drive but it didn't lead to anything. And after awhile I couldn't even get the connecting sound anymore. It seems safe to say that it is really out of my hands at this point. It has all of her teaching stuff on it and she is willing to pay at least some money to get the information back so hopefully there is a place in town that can fix it.

After I gave up on that I watched YouTube videos and eventually got around to responding to someone on the discussion post for this week. Late tonight my academic libraries professor sent out a message that he would be offline for the weekend because this morning his car was hit head-on by a drunk driver. At 10:30AM. The drunk driver than fled the scene but a stranger on a motorcycle followed him and after about two miles was able to subdue the driver until the police arrived. The professor said he was alright other than bruising from the airbag and seat belt but had gained a new perspective on life. He also said that he had seen it coming and knew it was going to happen and I can relate to that because when my pickup was totaled I could see the other car coming right at me and knew I was screwed. It's a very uncomfortable feeling.

When I had finished my discussion post I took about thirty or forty-five minutes to play a little Minecraft because that has been on my mind a lot recently. I have an idea for an underground mine cart track system and I wanted to build the hub for it which will be under my house. I built a third basement with plenty of room to make things happen. Hopefully. I've never actually experimented with mine carts before. I've seen them a lot in videos but I'll have to brush up on the idea behind them. That won't happen any time soon though. I've got a lot of stuff to do for school.

Tomorrow I need to figure out all the reading I need to do for classes and seriously look at the final metadata assignment because it is due next Friday. I know it involves making a crosswalk between two metadata schemas but that's about it. It would be nice if I could get most or all of it done this weekend but that seems very unrealistic.

October 1, 2015

 Yesterday morning when I got to work, along with several monitors being out of place and having to push in stools and put headphones back on towers, even though I had done all of that before I left the day before, my office chair was also missing. I ended up finding it completely lowered and pushed in at one of the computers in the back row. That monitor was also pulled forward as far as it could go and tilted up, and the stool that is normally there was far under the desk. To me it looked like a small child wanted to get comfortable. A small child after school under the “supervision” of a Boys & Girls Club worker. It seems that a lot of the workers want to be friends with the kids, not disciplinarians, and I learned recently that they really stress the “club” part of their name. Which I guess is an excuse for the kids to misbehave in the school, before and after school hours, when school employees aren't there to keep them in line. Things get broken, go missing, or are left in shambles, but it's okay, because it's a club and there are no rules or sense of responsibility.

Anyway, I know my office chair gets used when I'm not there but I can ignore it, until it is left in the back of the room in a blatant display of its misuse. That was the last straw and I emailed the principal to see if we could institute a “policing your area” policy in the computer lab after school so I don't have to come in every morning and pick up after Boys & Girls Club. She ended up talking to the new girl in charge of it and she spoke with me yesterday afternoon and said she would do a better job of making sure things were in order. I am hopeful. This morning I didn't have to push in any stools or put up any headphones, that's at least a one day improvement.

I finished watching the second season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. this morning. I'll be honest, I was getting kind of tired of the drama over the last several episodes. Maybe because I was spreading out my watching, only seeing small chunks at a time, but it seemed like it was dragging on forever. It was also the drama built out of misunderstanding, which I can't stand, especially when I am the omniscient viewer, privy to details that would easily clear a situation up but are lacking for the characters in question. It's over now, though, so I can move on to other things. Or maybe just back to Psych.

Before work this morning I went to the Treasurer's office to pick up my vehicle registration. Instead of taking a number they have a new system where you type your phone number on this large touchscreen. Then you get a text message and someone calls your number out when it is your turn. Helpful I guess if it is really busy but I was the only person in line. Also, they don't read out your whole phone number over the intercom, which is good, but also unexpected. I was kind of zoned out in my own world when they read out a number. I was wondering who it belonged to, maybe someone in the bathroom, because I was the only one not being helped and no one was coming forward. Then the lady at the open desk got my attention and asked if that was my number because I was the only one not being helped. When she said the number again I realized that it was in fact my number. The last four digits of my phone number. It is weird only hearing the second half of your phone number, especially when you are programmed to hear phone numbers read all the way through. Anyway, I told her about the message I got, verified who I was, and got my registration. It was actually in the mail pile to be sent out so it is a good thing I went before work.

I spent over an hour this morning cleaning all the desks and computers in the lab. This included the monitors which tend to get covered in snot because kids can never quite managed to turn their head or cover their face when they sneeze. I also replaced all the mouse pads. I've been holding off because the mouse pads are crap, I guess we got them for free at some point, and they don't hold up to kids very well. Namely, Boys & Girls Club kids. When I put them out originally, at least a few of them were damaged by the next day, and it happened at Boys & Girls Club. Slowly but surely they were all damaged. I had been planning to put out replacements and I figured right after attention had been brought to the undesirable state the lab was being left in, would be as good a time as any. Maybe for a little while longer there will be a reprieve from the disregard for school property.

There were classes in the lab throughout the day. The only one really worth mentioning was the second kindergarten class, which was logging into Compass Learning for the first time. For the first two years I think I logged them in the entire time. Last year I had them start logging in during the second half of the year. And this year, I've started them from the beginning. And they can handle it. Most of them, anyway. They'll get better. There were eight kids missing today out of the twenty-four in the class, which made a big difference. The best part was that no one cried. Last year there were criers but we managed to avoid that this year, so I'll say that was a win.

We finished up the last MAP tests today, with one day to spare, so I'm pretty happy. Now I just need to wait for tests to be deleted so I can print reports. I just had the thought that I didn't shutdown the computers in the lab and that has to be done on computers that were used for testing in order for scores to be submitted. I didn't do it yesterday either because we didn't test, and most of the computers weren't shutdown by Boys & Girls Club. Hopefully they managed at least the three that were used for testing today. I think last year or the year before an email was sent out about a computer still being on in the building that was preventing scores from being uploaded. That ended up being a laptop that they were still testing on. I didn't get an email today so we'll hope for the best.

After school when I walked out of the lab I ran into one of the fifth grade teachers in the hall and I ended up talking to her for awhile about her broken flash drive. After clocking out I walked by the principal's office and she asked me if I happened to remember her state assessment log-in information because she couldn't find it. I thought I might still have it written down from the one time I had to use it last year when she was gone so I went back to the lab and looked. Turns out I didn't. I probably shredded it. Which is good, but not when you need it. She texted me later that she ended up finding it so that's good. Finally, as I was walking by the library, the fifth grade teacher and the librarian were in there so I stopped in to tell the librarian I would have the Lexile chart for her tomorrow because I didn't have time to finish it today. It is the color chart I made for her last year but I didn't save the original, editable copy, only the PDF, so I had to remake it. She wanted me to take the grade levels off because a teacher wanted to show it to her class and the librarian didn't want the grade levels being shown, especially for the lower kids who would see their Lexile range attached to a lower grade level. After talking with her I'm going to also take off the label for each section so now it will just so the range and the associated color. I ended up standing and talking to them for quite awhile about all sorts of random things, and finally left the building a little after 5:15PM.

I will confess that I did not read the final metadata article tonight. I had a headache and I just couldn't read a thirty-two page PDF. Fortunately I was able to write my discussion post without it. I will probably want to at least skim the important parts for the crosswalk assignment, but for the moment, I'm good. I also posted my research topic for my academic libraries class to the discussion thread. Because that is something we were supposed to do this week. The professor also put up a second discussion thread but I decided to save that for tomorrow. It is about budgets and will be easy enough to bullshit but I wanted to put some thought into it when I wasn't so tired.

Tomorrow, I'm going to finish the Lexile chart and edit some pictures for the other kindergarten teacher because he saw the ones I made for the other kindergarten teacher and asked if I could do the same for him. I took the pictures today I just need to edit them. I imagine I will probably do a bunch of other stuff as well.