 | eCachecommentary from down jersey |
Despite my best intentions, I am scrambling for the opening of this school year. All that is tripping me up is out of my control.
Despite all that I keep plugging away. I look forward to the arrival of this year’s students.
Hot damn, I didn’t know she smoked!
For years I have wanted to computerize my lesson plans. Yes, I have typed my lessons. But each year it is the same process. I have been able to copy-and-paste, but that is inefficient. I have run into all sorts of troubles trying to do what I have wanted to do and keep putting off the project.
Late last school year my district announced that we would finally be required to submit our lesson plans electronically. They crafted a Word document they expect each teacher to use. Faced with that, I figured it was time to get my act together.
The template provided is not helpful to me. It displays five days of lessons spread out over how many ever pages it will take. The way it is constructed, long thin columns that break in the middle of lessons make a muddled mess out of the plans. To me, plans should be functional. A document like that would not serve me well, nor do I think it will serve a substitute well.
Nevertheless . . .
So in June i began building a database of my lessons. The idea is that the database will hold all my lessons. Once typed, I will not need to re-type them or copy-and-paste them ever again. Sure, some lessons will be tweaked. Some new lessons will be added, but the majority of this busy work will be done.
From there I figured there had to be some way to populate the district’s Word template. Since it is to be uploaded to a server, I’ll never have to print this thing, so the formatting is not a hige concern; I can provide the data in exactly the same format they designed. All I’ll do is link it to my database and populate the template weekly with my lessons.
It sounded reasonable, but it proved to be much more difficult for me than I thought at first. I tried everything in my skillset to dump 40 lessons weekly into this template, but I could not do so other than as a typical mail merge, which created a 40-page document. While I wouldn’t really care, that is not what was expected.
I sought all sorts of technical help from certified Office developers. I had a plan at one point to join the 40 lessons into one record. While I knew that was inefficient, it would do the trick. Each lesson has eight required fields (although my plans have many more). With 40 lessons per week, I was looking at creating a record with 320 fields. While I struggled looking for a way to join all these fields, someone mentioned to me that the database is not capable of handling that many fields in a record. Sigh . . .
I was back at square one. I spent all day on this and finally found a way. Directory merges are just the thing for this project. Once I taught myself this process, all came together fairly quickly. I was stumped for a bit until I realized next is the cell beside the cell I am working on, not the one below it, like I wanted it to be. I adjust a table in the database to account for this since I saw no way to change the direction. From there it was just cleaning up some stuff.
I knew there was a way to get 40 merges onto one table, I just had no idea how to do so. Now I know.
My first week of plans are done. Now I’ll create a template to display these same lessons in a usable format for me. It’ll be trivial work at this point.
It feels good to solve a sticky project. I have taken one of the tasks of my job I do not care for and made it an efficient process. Now that it is built, I can look forward to next year when I will gain lots of time in my schedule. Woo hoo!
Well, I nodded off after I heard “I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.” I am now catching highlights.
Obama just doesn’t get it, but I will happily accept the raise he stated he will give me. It just goes to show he will not honor the Constitution. One of the themes I have outlined here at eCache is that the federal government has no role in education. That is precisely because our forefathers provided no role for them. As a matter of fact, they stated in the Tenth Amendment that anything they did not specifically delineate to the federal government, is a right of the states and the people.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
So, why did The One stand up at Invesco Field and declare that as POTUS he will gaurantee higher salaries for teachers? POTUS is the head of the executive branch of the federal government. He doesn’t understand the job description of the office.
To be fair, many who have held the job and who aspire for it have not. Dear reader, demand more of your elected leaders. Do not accept the lesser of two evils. Demand that your president understands the Constitution. Shun platitudes in favor of sound policy.
Obama fails on that standard.
Should he be elected, hold him to his campaign promise. I expect more money in my paycheck. Are you prepared to pay for that? 
How come my daughter’s pre-school can have an automated call system that begins speaking when I pick up the telephone but the telemarketers have a delay? . . . Speaking of telemarketers, the silly group that has been bombarding us this week seemed to stop when I asked to speak with a supervisor after I heard the conversation about them getting high while they waited to click in. Stupid people . . . My classroom is in pretty good order. I still have paperwork to do, but the set-up is done. I finally am so organized it took very little effort to get ready this year . . . The pollen is coming as I have had headaches each day this week . . . Smoked a beer can chicken yesterday. Flavor was excellent, but I could not control the temps and it cooked much faster than I wanted it too . . . The speakers at the Democratic Convention have not been good the first two nights save Hillary, and she only took care of herself. The folks b4 her were awful . . . Speaking of work, I am going to have begin shaving on a regular basis now. Sigh . . . Optometrist appointment tomorrow. I suspect I will have a stronger bifocal script . . . Fatherhood is awesome! Particularly when the little girl is having a Daddy day . . . Michelle Malkin highlights some of the reasons why I am no longer a Republican . . . I just cleaned up my RSS feeds. There were a lot of dead feeds, blogs I rarely read, and interests that no longer errrr interest me . . . Billy Jeff had a good line tonight: “People have always been more impressed with the power of our example than the example of our power.” Good line, but still bad policy . . . In 1988 I voted for Dukakis. I lived in Boston. I guess I was young, idealistic, and feeling my oats. This ass just said the last seven and a half years are the worst he has had in his life. Sounds like he and Michelle Obama are cut from the same cloth . . .
Very quietly New Jersey lawmakers and Gov. Corzine took another $3.9 billion from taxpayers last week. It is not unprecedented; $8.6 billion was taken and squandered on school construction. Of course that money didn’t get the job done because it was so poorly mismanaged. Now that Corzine has installed his crony at the headed of the former Schools Construction Corp. does anyone feel it will be any less so? Neither do I.
So these folks decided $3.9 billion wasn’t worth asking our opinion of. Today they began shelling out the money.
Just what does a $127,000,000 school look like? I cannot fathom why any one school needs to cost that much.
Dunston McNichol’s article states:
Officials said the original program has been completely re-tooled, and includes tight controls to limit overhead costs and ensure that officials have enough money in hand to complete the projects they launch.
What’s the over/under before we hear about corruption with this money?