I had volunteered as a teacher aide at Heron Creek before so I had an idea what I was going to experience as an intern with Mr. Munnell's 7th grade math classes. The past days I had graded bellwork, homework, quizzes, tests. Mr. Munnell gives me an answer key for all these and sometimes tells me which questions to grade. I'm pretty fast at grading but during and even after I'm done grading I listen to the students and observe how Mr. Munnell handles situations like when they get rowdy. I hear a lot of "Get back in your seat, keep your hands to yourselves, be quiet." There's a lot of repetition of that. I had Mr. Munnell as my math teacher before and we weren't as bad as this years students. I enjoy helping Mr. Munnell grade papers but feel sorry for him when he tries to teach kids that don't want to learn. Not all the students are bad but even when I grade their work you can tell there are those who care and those that don't with the ones that don't weighing much greater than those who do. Something funny that mad me laugh was when Mr. Munnell had said to one of the students "You kept your pants on all class, I'm so proud of you." I was surprised that he had to even say that. It seems as if that style with the pants sagging has made its way over to the middle school. The only issue I have with the 7th graders is that they are very immature. They don't understand to do their work, they walk around the class wandering. Some students are even causing problems like name calling, hitting, tripping. It was not like that when I was in their grade. I do not know what is going on nowadays. Seriously, I love working with kids but these kids are so bad. Mr. Munnell is a good teacher and he has rewards for students when they behave. He was in the Airforce so he has this ranking he gives to the students and if they make the highest rank like by haivng all their materials all the time they are able to have a party at the end of the year which I had been a part of when I had Mr. Munnell. Mr. Munnell is a nice teacher and I get frustrated for him when he has to repetitively stray from the lesson when the goofballs are acting up in class. I believe I would work better with younger kids like 1st, 2nd, 3rd graders because I think they are easier to handle. 7th graders want to do what they want to do and are harder to reason with. I really think it has something to do with how parents raise their children. They are disrespectful to the teacher and to each other, and when the bell rings there is chaos. It is not like at North Port High school where students at least hang around before they go to class. The kids at Heron Creek are running and chasing each other in the halls and carrying other kids on their backs, it's like a zoo. I wish I had some authority to fix the craziness, that should be enforced. I don't know what happened to Heron Creek but the kids have gotten wilder through the generations. What hurts me the most is that they don't care to learn (not all of them) which is going to bite them in the butt when they get to high school. They need to clean up their act. Again it's not every student but the majority. I don't want to seem like I'm complaining, I'm just shocked to see how the younger generations have changed dramatically from my generation when I was in 7th grade. I really do enjoy analyzing the class and helping Mr. Munnell out.
***There is a lot of work in being a teacher. You not only grade papers from every block but you become almost like a parent to all the students, they spend most of their day with teachers and it seems like teachers have taken on the role of parenting students in addition to teaching and educating students.
January 28th, we were getting new laptops in and we needed locks to secure them for the teachers to their desks. So I had to find all the locks and matched keys. Also having to add tags to them and writing what number they corresponded with. Along with the printer that stopped working. Needed to be replaced, and change the IP address.
February 1st, with the batch of computers coming in this week we needed to grab the laptop carts that are in storage. Mind you the storage room is on the other side of the school. At first I went and grabbed two carts to later find out we needed a total of nine. So what ended up happening was, I would hold onto the cart and they would drive me with the golf-cart. We had all kinds of kids and staff looking at us all confused and or scared.
February 8th, Mark and Marie had already began working on all the laptops. Workstations had been setup all throughout the room making it nearly impossible to walk in. Cables are scattered throughout the place, if you were to trip over one wire you'd probably wipe out 30+ computers in one move. What needed to be done though was a nightmare waiting for us. To begin, they needed to be re-imaged, make sure the laptop is in the inventory, install all the required software that doesn't transfer over through the image, change the setup, rename the computer its fitting to. With the installs one of them is a bat file which is a measly shortcut to a install file that adds the security to the laptops. Also so we can remote into them, and forwards updates to them.
February 11th, all those laptops we had added the bat files too didn't work. Apparently the bat file coding was directing it to the wrong file in the setup folder. You would think before they give you the bat file they would make sure its right. It looks something similar to this:
"dir{path}makelist somefolder\filename.txt" along with some other random stuff like, /s,%1:2
So we got a new bat file, but of course its never that easy; that one didn't work either. But I couldn't stick around any longer so I'm not sure if they ended up getting the file to work; my guess is no.
February 16th, was yet another day of just reformatting the laptops. Nothing exciting happened seeing as all the problems had already occurred earlier. Along with the occasional laptops that had a BIOS password for some pointless reason. So I had to reset the hardware on those ones yet again. Its rather simple to do, you just need to take the casing off, unscrew the keyboard from inside, unlock it and snap it off. Under where the keyboard is where of course everything is located. But the main part your looking for is the "cmos battery" and unplug it from your motherboard which then resets the configuration.
February 17th, felt just like an exact replica of the day before. It was really awkward that day; it had seemed like I was having Déjà Vu. only thing I did different was organizing the laptop carts. So all together it was a very thrilling, exciting day...wait who am I kidding it was miserable. After having to deal with these laptops for so long I'd do anything else but that.
February 22 & 24th consisted of the same things I've been doing for the past few weeks. I honestly don't know how Mark and Marie can actually do this for a living. After messing with laptops for this long I hate the site of any computers. So nothing has changed besides maybe sometimes adding different software to the laptops that teachers may have specifically asked for.
March 1st & 4th these two days I actually did something different then same repeated nonsense of the laptops. We were uninstalling Adobe software on the lab next door and reinstalling the updated software and the new serial key. It took ages to uninstall it all off the computer completely; you couldn't leave it alone because you had to keep clicking steps. Add that with 40+ computers you are running all around.
March 16th was a productive day I had to go to an Art room that I actually had when I was in middle school. We had previously fixed her to computers and brought them back to her room. I had to set them up on a different part of the classroom and redo everything. Moving tables around, and opening the network ports in the server board room. After finally getting them all setup. She had two printers that needed to be added which took a while to finally get working.
March 24th I had to take all the finished laptops that we've been doing for months out of the carts and count how many there were. With the older laptops I had to look at all the PR numbers and write them down. After that a shipment of active votes had came in. So I had to rip open the boxes and stack them up. With the empty boxes I had to get old printer cartages and put 10 in each box. They only accept 10 per month to refill. After that I had to help with getting pictures off of a digital camera.
April, for the past couple weeks its been the same routine. Everything has been backed up and keeps piling up with more work. Mostly consisting of deleting the passwords on BIOS and re-imaging the old student laptops. Its easy but is very time consuming which limits the amount which can be finished.
April, still having to delete passwords on the BIOS for the laptops. There had been a small mistake and we finished a full group of laptops for a Team just to have to start over again. So I had to remove the labels off with this type of alcohol remover. It'll amaze you how effective a putty knife can be.
When I got to the office both Marie and Mark seem to both be...missing. So I set forth to find them trying to remember something they had been doing the few days before. Well with no luck I went into the front office and paged their radios only for them to not have them with them. So I sent a message to Marks phone and evidentially he was over at Glenallen Elementary, and Marie had called in sick. So after the eventful wild goose chase came to an end the day had already been almost finished.
A teacher had came in complaining that her computer had been getting slower and slower each day. (I couldn't tell you how many times I've heard this.) So we just backed up her files onto the server and re-imaged her teacher laptop and installed her software needed for her class and returned her files.
Heron Creek was having another movie event so Marie had me go check and see if the stage was all working correctly. After that I had to bring the cart that had the projector and everything else to get the movie to play. I couldn't of picked a worse time to set it up though. The janitors had been cleaning the floor with these big vehicles and made the floor extremely slippery.
Just when I thought I wouldn't have to use the shopping cart again...I did. I had to go pick up 7 computer. Well when ever you push this cart throughout the school every single crack it runs over sounds like a gun shot. Now imagine that plus 200+ more times. The classroom of course had to be upstairs to so I had to take the nasty elevator that remains 120ish degrees at all times. I had to make two trips because of that much equipment she was getting rid of. Well when pushing the cart back the elevator almost gave out and plummeted to my near death. Also since now there is a lot of weight in the cart the cracks have amplified dramatically. I'm surprised kids weren't thinking they were under attack.
Mark and I were going around with this big bulky air compressor that he managed to shove in a box. Well when we went to classrooms to fix active-board issues we also sprayed them with the compressor to clean them out, it was super effective. This one kid wouldn't leave me alone, I've never seen a kid ask so many questions in such a short amount of time. One of the few thousand he asked was "Is that your dad?" Referring to Mark. I couldn't help but just laugh at the question, so I answered with "No, I'm his father actually".
Mr. Wormington had came into the office and we talked about a lot of things. Which resulted in me not being able to get much done. Marie didn't mind though because shes just that cool. Wormington was just reflecting on the times he had me from Freshman to Junior year and all the amazing work I had done compared to everyone else. Which then lead to us both wondering why none of my work was ever hung in the office.
One of the security officers came in to mess around and small talk. But ended up turning into him talking to me about him being a police officer for 20+ years or so up north. He started to ask me what I planned on during once I graduate and the opportunities that I have and how this internship is a good head start. He then told me the story of his daughter which works for some kinda secrete agency that works under water doing spec-op missions in submarines testing new types of "things". Most of it was all classified so couldn't be full depth and detail.
All the older models of laptops were getting deleted. Meaning I had to wipe out the hard drive and everything for it to be thrown away. Its not as easy as it seems though. I had a floppy disk which helped me delete everything. But those laptops didn't have a floppy disk drive so I had to get an external USB one. The laptops had to be setup to read the USB then change the boot order so instead of launching the Hard drive first it will read the floppy disk. Which in this case is planning on removing the hard drive. After launching it goes into a command prompt screen where you type in "fdisk" and sort through the menus.
With the last week coming around the corner for the internship I made sure I was going to finish deleting all the laptops. Marie and Mark were both sad to know I was leaving soon. Along with some other staff at the school that got to know me pretty well and knew that I was a great help for them.
It was my last day there and of course both of them had to be gone. I knew Marie wasn't going to be there so we had already said goodbye and everything. But Mark and I still yet to this day haven't said anything. I had went back to my intern the next day to get my timelog filled out and talked with Marie again and had a great chat, but Mark still wasn't there. Marie wished my luck in the future and told me I should be just fine for time to come. Gave me great advice and said that we'll keep in touch.
I had volunteered as a teacher aide at Heron Creek before so I had an idea what I was going to experience as an intern with Mr. Munnell's 7th grade math classes. The past days I had graded bellwork, homework, quizzes, tests. Mr. Munnell gives me an answer key for all these and sometimes tells me which questions to grade. I'm pretty fast at grading but during and even after I'm done grading I listen to the students and observe how Mr. Munnell handles situations like when they get rowdy. I hear a lot of "Get back in your seat, keep your hands to yourselves, be quiet." There's a lot of repetition of that. I had Mr. Munnell as my math teacher before and we weren't as bad as this years students. I enjoy helping Mr. Munnell grade papers but feel sorry for him when he tries to teach kids that don't want to learn. Not all the students are bad but even when I grade their work you can tell there are those who care and those that don't with the ones that don't weighing much greater than those who do. Something funny that mad me laugh was when Mr. Munnell had said to one of the students "You kept your pants on all class, I'm so proud of you." I was surprised that he had to even say that. It seems as if that style with the pants sagging has made its way over to the middle school. The only issue I have with the 7th graders is that they are very immature. They don't understand to do their work, they walk around the class wandering. Some students are even causing problems like name calling, hitting, tripping. It was not like that when I was in their grade. I do not know what is going on nowadays. Seriously, I love working with kids but these kids are so bad. Mr. Munnell is a good teacher and he has rewards for students when they behave. He was in the Airforce so he has this ranking he gives to the students and if they make the highest rank like by haivng all their materials all the time they are able to have a party at the end of the year which I had been a part of when I had Mr. Munnell. Mr. Munnell is a nice teacher and I get frustrated for him when he has to repetitively stray from the lesson when the goofballs are acting up in class. I believe I would work better with younger kids like 1st, 2nd, 3rd graders because I think they are easier to handle. 7th graders want to do what they want to do and are harder to reason with. I really think it has something to do with how parents raise their children. They are disrespectful to the teacher and to each other, and when the bell rings there is chaos. It is not like at North Port High school where students at least hang around before they go to class. The kids at Heron Creek are running and chasing each other in the halls and carrying other kids on their backs, it's like a zoo. I wish I had some authority to fix the craziness, that should be enforced. I don't know what happened to Heron Creek but the kids have gotten wilder through the generations. What hurts me the most is that they don't care to learn (not all of them) which is going to bite them in the butt when they get to high school. They need to clean up their act. Again it's not every student but the majority. I don't want to seem like I'm complaining, I'm just shocked to see how the younger generations have changed dramatically from my generation when I was in 7th grade. I really do enjoy analyzing the class and helping Mr. Munnell out.
ReplyDelete***There is a lot of work in being a teacher. You not only grade papers from every block but you become almost like a parent to all the students, they spend most of their day with teachers and it seems like teachers have taken on the role of parenting students in addition to teaching and educating students.
January 28th, we were getting new laptops in and we needed locks to secure them for the teachers to their desks. So I had to find all the locks and matched keys. Also having to add tags to them and writing what number they corresponded with. Along with the printer that stopped working. Needed to be replaced, and change the IP address.
ReplyDeleteFebruary 1st, with the batch of computers coming in this week we needed to grab the laptop carts that are in storage. Mind you the storage room is on the other side of the school. At first I went and grabbed two carts to later find out we needed a total of nine. So what ended up happening was, I would hold onto the cart and they would drive me with the golf-cart. We had all kinds of kids and staff looking at us all confused and or scared.
ReplyDeleteFebruary 8th, Mark and Marie had already began working on all the laptops. Workstations had been setup all throughout the room making it nearly impossible to walk in. Cables are scattered throughout the place, if you were to trip over one wire you'd probably wipe out 30+ computers in one move. What needed to be done though was a nightmare waiting for us. To begin, they needed to be re-imaged, make sure the laptop is in the inventory, install all the required software that doesn't transfer over through the image, change the setup, rename the computer its fitting to. With the installs one of them is a bat file which is a measly shortcut to a install file that adds the security to the laptops. Also so we can remote into them, and forwards updates to them.
ReplyDeleteFebruary 11th, all those laptops we had added the bat files too didn't work. Apparently the bat file coding was directing it to the wrong file in the setup folder. You would think before they give you the bat file they would make sure its right. It looks something similar to this:
ReplyDelete"dir{path}makelist somefolder\filename.txt"
along with some other random stuff like, /s,%1:2
So we got a new bat file, but of course its never that easy; that one didn't work either. But I couldn't stick around any longer so I'm not sure if they ended up getting the file to work; my guess is no.
February 16th, was yet another day of just reformatting the laptops. Nothing exciting happened seeing as all the problems had already occurred earlier. Along with the occasional laptops that had a BIOS password for some pointless reason. So I had to reset the hardware on those ones yet again. Its rather simple to do, you just need to take the casing off, unscrew the keyboard from inside, unlock it and snap it off. Under where the keyboard is where of course everything is located. But the main part your looking for is the "cmos battery" and unplug it from your motherboard which then resets the configuration.
ReplyDeleteFebruary 17th, felt just like an exact replica of the day before. It was really awkward that day; it had seemed like I was having Déjà Vu. only thing I did different was organizing the laptop carts. So all together it was a very thrilling, exciting day...wait who am I kidding it was miserable. After having to deal with these laptops for so long I'd do anything else but that.
ReplyDeleteFebruary 22 & 24th consisted of the same things I've been doing for the past few weeks. I honestly don't know how Mark and Marie can actually do this for a living. After messing with laptops for this long I hate the site of any computers. So nothing has changed besides maybe sometimes adding different software to the laptops that teachers may have specifically asked for.
ReplyDeleteMarch 1st & 4th these two days I actually did something different then same repeated nonsense of the laptops. We were uninstalling Adobe software on the lab next door and reinstalling the updated software and the new serial key. It took ages to uninstall it all off the computer completely; you couldn't leave it alone because you had to keep clicking steps. Add that with 40+ computers you are running all around.
ReplyDeleteMarch 16th was a productive day I had to go to an Art room that I actually had when I was in middle school. We had previously fixed her to computers and brought them back to her room. I had to set them up on a different part of the classroom and redo everything. Moving tables around, and opening the network ports in the server board room. After finally getting them all setup. She had two printers that needed to be added which took a while to finally get working.
ReplyDeleteMarch 24th I had to take all the finished laptops that we've been doing for months out of the carts and count how many there were. With the older laptops I had to look at all the PR numbers and write them down. After that a shipment of active votes had came in. So I had to rip open the boxes and stack them up. With the empty boxes I had to get old printer cartages and put 10 in each box. They only accept 10 per month to refill. After that I had to help with getting pictures off of a digital camera.
ReplyDeleteApril, for the past couple weeks its been the same routine. Everything has been backed up and keeps piling up with more work. Mostly consisting of deleting the passwords on BIOS and re-imaging the old student laptops. Its easy but is very time consuming which limits the amount which can be finished.
ReplyDeleteApril, still having to delete passwords on the BIOS for the laptops. There had been a small mistake and we finished a full group of laptops for a Team just to have to start over again. So I had to remove the labels off with this type of alcohol remover. It'll amaze you how effective a putty knife can be.
ReplyDeleteWhen I got to the office both Marie and Mark seem to both be...missing. So I set forth to find them trying to remember something they had been doing the few days before. Well with no luck I went into the front office and paged their radios only for them to not have them with them. So I sent a message to Marks phone and evidentially he was over at Glenallen Elementary, and Marie had called in sick. So after the eventful wild goose chase came to an end the day had already been almost finished.
ReplyDeleteA teacher had came in complaining that her computer had been getting slower and slower each day. (I couldn't tell you how many times I've heard this.) So we just backed up her files onto the server and re-imaged her teacher laptop and installed her software needed for her class and returned her files.
ReplyDeleteHeron Creek was having another movie event so Marie had me go check and see if the stage was all working correctly. After that I had to bring the cart that had the projector and everything else to get the movie to play. I couldn't of picked a worse time to set it up though. The janitors had been cleaning the floor with these big vehicles and made the floor extremely slippery.
ReplyDeleteJust when I thought I wouldn't have to use the shopping cart again...I did. I had to go pick up 7 computer. Well when ever you push this cart throughout the school every single crack it runs over sounds like a gun shot. Now imagine that plus 200+ more times. The classroom of course had to be upstairs to so I had to take the nasty elevator that remains 120ish degrees at all times. I had to make two trips because of that much equipment she was getting rid of. Well when pushing the cart back the elevator almost gave out and plummeted to my near death. Also since now there is a lot of weight in the cart the cracks have amplified dramatically. I'm surprised kids weren't thinking they were under attack.
ReplyDeleteMark and I were going around with this big bulky air compressor that he managed to shove in a box. Well when we went to classrooms to fix active-board issues we also sprayed them with the compressor to clean them out, it was super effective. This one kid wouldn't leave me alone, I've never seen a kid ask so many questions in such a short amount of time. One of the few thousand he asked was "Is that your dad?" Referring to Mark. I couldn't help but just laugh at the question, so I answered with "No, I'm his father actually".
ReplyDeleteMr. Wormington had came into the office and we talked about a lot of things. Which resulted in me not being able to get much done. Marie didn't mind though because shes just that cool. Wormington was just reflecting on the times he had me from Freshman to Junior year and all the amazing work I had done compared to everyone else. Which then lead to us both wondering why none of my work was ever hung in the office.
ReplyDeleteOne of the security officers came in to mess around and small talk. But ended up turning into him talking to me about him being a police officer for 20+ years or so up north. He started to ask me what I planned on during once I graduate and the opportunities that I have and how this internship is a good head start. He then told me the story of his daughter which works for some kinda secrete agency that works under water doing spec-op missions in submarines testing new types of "things". Most of it was all classified so couldn't be full depth and detail.
ReplyDeleteAll the older models of laptops were getting deleted. Meaning I had to wipe out the hard drive and everything for it to be thrown away. Its not as easy as it seems though. I had a floppy disk which helped me delete everything. But those laptops didn't have a floppy disk drive so I had to get an external USB one. The laptops had to be setup to read the USB then change the boot order so instead of launching the Hard drive first it will read the floppy disk. Which in this case is planning on removing the hard drive. After launching it goes into a command prompt screen where you type in "fdisk" and sort through the menus.
ReplyDeleteWith the last week coming around the corner for the internship I made sure I was going to finish deleting all the laptops. Marie and Mark were both sad to know I was leaving soon. Along with some other staff at the school that got to know me pretty well and knew that I was a great help for them.
ReplyDeleteIt was my last day there and of course both of them had to be gone. I knew Marie wasn't going to be there so we had already said goodbye and everything. But Mark and I still yet to this day haven't said anything. I had went back to my intern the next day to get my timelog filled out and talked with Marie again and had a great chat, but Mark still wasn't there. Marie wished my luck in the future and told me I should be just fine for time to come. Gave me great advice and said that we'll keep in touch.
ReplyDelete