LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

School

Went flying yesterday

by 4 Comments

Curt Niermann took Samith and I flying yesterday while Lauren went to some dinner celebrating the school accreditation visit. I think I got the better end of the deal.

About two years ago, at Lincoln Lutheran’s dinner & auction, Curt bid on and won a flying package. I was expecting to just take off, fly around for a bit and land. I think that’s what we all thought, because we were surprised when our pilot asked if we wanted to go to Nebraska City to see the flooding.

We were all up for that, but we made a little detour first. We flew up to Seward and I have a 4 minute video that didn’t really turn out very good. In person we could pick out all sorts of detail, but the video isn’t that good. I might try messing with it and posting it later. We practically flew over Sam’s house.

Then we followed highway 34 into Lincoln.

It was cool to see the trip I take every day to school from the air. My favorite part of air travel is seeing things from this relatively low altitude. It’s like a real life game of Sim City. The Lincoln air traffic controller in Lincoln gave us permission to fly over Lincoln. We were actually pretty close to Curt’s house right before we flew over the airport.

The safest place to fly near an airport is right over the airport. It took me a while to figure out why.

I was on the wrong side of the plane to get a good shot of the capital or Memorial Stadium. But as we cruised down O Street, I got a good view of Lincoln Lutheran

Once we left Lincoln we headed to Nebraska City. I had lots of questions for the pilot, but my headset wasn’t very good, so after a few failed attempts, I just sat back and enjoyed the scenery. When we got to Nebraska City, not only was Highway 2 closed into Iowa, but I-29 was closed as well.

Sooo much water, and there are lots of places in Nebraska that are worse off than this. Best not to dwell on that. The trip back was a little quieter. Curt got to fly the plane for a little bit.

The landing was pretty rough, and our pilot really wasn’t satisfied with it. So he said, “It looks like we have about 10 minutes left. Do you want to try that landing again?” We all agreed so we did the riskiest parts one more time. This time the landing was as smooth as silk.

 

A little bit of Mona

by 4 Comments

Our previous previous art teacher at Lincoln Lutheran, Donna Willet, always had a little cut out of the Mona Lisa peeking over one of the bulletin boards in the art room. Donna’s retired from teaching about four years ago and the cut out came down. I got tired of not seeing it and finally got around to doing something about it.

There are lots of famous paintings and lots of classrooms at school. I’m thinking about art bombing the place. Anyone have suggestions?

Tea for two (erm, one)

by 8 Comments

Lauren said, and I quote, ” You have to write the post tomorrow. No tag backs.”

Late last week, one of our sixth grade teachers –sixth graders are our youngest students– was anxiously hanging out by that new fangled coffee maker that you put one tiny cup of coffee in, and out comes a full sized cup of coffee. You know what I’m talking about?

Well, it was taking much longer than she had anticipated, and she was worried about getting out to her room on time. I didn’t have a class 1st period, so I said that she should just go out to her classroom, and I’d bring her coffee out to her.

img_9893

Everything was going along smoothly, until I turned the cup of (and at this point I realized that it might not, in fact, be coffee) around and noticed the logo on the cup itself.

This was a real problem. I couldn’t just be seen walking this cup of what I was gradually coming to realize was tea around the school. People would talk. Long standing agreements and treaties would be compromised.

img_9894

Frankly, I was a little bit surprised. I thought I knew on which side of the fence everyone around me stood on this issue. But this sixth grade teacher –I’m withholding her name, not to protect her innocence, but because I have blotted it from my mind– really threw me for a loop.

But I had said that I would deliver her pale, hot drink, and deliver it I would. It didn’t take very long to make the switch. All it took was a color printer and a little bit of packing tape. Well, there might have been a little more packing tape involved than was strictly necessary.

img_9896

I wanted to include a photo of her with the mug, but she didn’t think that was a good idea.

 

 

No world wide web

by 3 Comments

The internet was (actually still is) down at Lincoln Lutheran for most of the day today. I told Windstream of our woes around 10:30 and bothered them every hour for an update on what they had found. Finally, at about 3:00, the 7th guy I talked to said that they had been, “really busy” and no one had actually even looked at my problem yet. Thanks Windstream.

Being without internet is more of a thing than it was even two years ago. Our teachers and students use it for getting assignments, working on them and turning them in. I spent most of the day in conversations like this:

everyone at school: When is the wi-fi going to be working?
me: The wi-fi is working.
everyone at school: Did it just come back?
me: No, it’s been working all day.
everyone at school: huh?

At this point I generally just walk off. Usually –here I’m just assuming– they figure out the difference between the wi-fi and the Internet. But if they don’t, I don’t really care at this point.

Eventually Jim from Windstream came by (I told the last Windstream guy I talked to to change our business hours to 8:00am to 8:00pm, because today was Awards Night, and I would be here anyway.) He couldn’t figure out why they had dispatched him without first doing some off-site diagnostics. I theorized with him that it was done mostly in an attempt to slow down the rate at which I was calling them.

Jim was nice, and seemed to know what he was doing, but a series of unfortunate coincidences (including, but not limited to a tornado warning) kept him from actually fixing the problem. He did, however, diagnose the problem.  There was evidently a light that won’t light on one side*. He took it back to his workshop to fix it up there and bring it back here. He’s actually going to try to bring it back tonight.

I’ve arranged a secret knock between Jim and our custodian Todd, so Todd can, at least theoretically, let Jim in. Jim says that best case scenario is that our internet might be back up in about two hours. Worst case scenario is, in his words, “a while”.

 

 

 

*It is actually quite surprising how accurate a description of the problem this turns out to be. The SFP that converts the light in the fiber optic cable from light to electrical impulses is receiving light correctly, but is failing to turn the corresponding electrical impulses back to light for the return trip.

by 4 Comments

I was grading math tests the other day. Things were going along more or less like they always do when you’re grading. One of the nice things about teaching maths is that the grading is pretty straightforward. At least it was until I got to Kyle’s test:

ninja1

I didn’t know what to do. I was stymied for a long time. I put it aside and graded some other, more poorly defended, tests. Eventually I came up with a plan. It took a trip to the art room and more time than it took to grade the test, but I eventually worked around his clever ploy.

ninja2

I taped the ninja to my monitor.

https://laurenandlloyd.com/2015/12/21/25858/

Old Timers

by 12 Comments

We got new atomic clocks at Lincoln Lutheran this year. Our clock system is older than the High School, and the display was shot, so we couldn’t program it anymore. We were no longer using it to ring the bells for class to start/stop (there’s a neat addon to the phone system that plays any  .wav file).

Instead of replacing it with a new clock system, it was decided to put atomic clocks in every classroom. I told them that all of our students had a clock with them at all times now, but you know how administrators love clocks.

Anyway, I asked Doug to put the old clocks in the Tech Center. I originally thought that we would do something more orderly with them. You know, arrange them like you see on the wall of a news room with time zones. But there were no more than two of any style of clock in the whole school. Instead we hung them on the bulletin board. It turns out that I’m pretty good at bulletin boards. Who knew?

clock1

Our current plan is to label each with an imaginary location. Any suggestions?