It’s been a busy week. I’ve taken on some new side work with phibetaiota.net. We welcomed three guest students for visiting week at ALC Everett. I’ve been continuing my practice with the Ukulele and study of Javascript and Go.
Monday
I organized my thoughts and information on my new project for phibetaiota.net into my personal wiki.
Made an invoice for my stipend payment.
Got the first draft of the student agreement settled up.
Updated the design and set for my ALC Everett business cards.
Tuesday
I created the Code Hero group on the ALC website. I hope to use this group to coordinate the programming education program with my students in Everett as well as other people around the ALC network.
I wend to the park with everyone today and played Lava Monster at the play ground (it was a little rainy and no one was there). I was the monster, which meant that I lived in the lava (the ground around the play equipment) while everyone else tried to avoid me by keeping on the play equipment (which I wasn’t allowed to stand on, but could climb).
I lead a class on 1 point perspective. It was great to revisit the technique myself and see the students get really juiced about it.
I taught some computer science, because all my students hadn’t done the work I assigned I just went over my rngusus.html script.
I worked with parent Kelly and @Tommie on Kanban training. I’m excited to see Tommie using the kanban to organize a party and just thrilled to see Kelly so excited about learning this tool.
Wednesday
Today was another good day. I started the morning off playing GeoGessr (uhg, I hate words that drop the e) with the students. We were challenging the NYC school’s game, we didn’t quite beat them (here are the results) it was 13,508 to 15,808.
I then watched over the guys as we played egg drop again. We put a bunch of supplies on the ground and each team got to pick 5 items, one by one, round robin. We dropped them off the balcony and all the eggs survived, we set an intention to go back to the beach and drop them from the train bridge on Friday.
We did some art together, I taught one of the visiting students about 2 and 3 point perspective. While also introducing everyone to the Exquisite Corpse a game where paper is folded into four sections and passed around. Each section is for a head, body, legs, and feet of a monster. Once a player draws their section (starting at the top or bottom) they fold the paper so only the last bit of their lines are showing and give it to the next player. The results have been amazing!
I was able to spend a little bit working one on one with Stevie, he’s getting into Javascript and taking to it pretty well. I introduced him to codepen.io and a little bit of HTML and CSS.
After class I migrated the website phibetaiota.net to a new server. This was a bit of side work I picked up.
Had a great end of the day too, I finally made it over to the home of some friend’s of my host family, they treated me to dinner and some adult company. It was good to get out of the house a bit.
Thursday
Today I started out by adding “put personal intentions on the today board” to awareness. My hope is to focus the student’s personal intentions and help them make sure they make time to do them.
After morning checkin and intention setting we watch some Crash Course and Last Week Tonight.
We did some WikiTrails by starting with a random page and trying to make our way to a target, in this case we did Jesus (so easy) and Cascadia (7 jumps).
I was able to e-mail my friend who works on the Unhangout project to see if we could get it running for ALC, which would be a major tool to use for us.
We reviewed the student agreement sheet that I drafted and everyone seemed to be happy with it.
Went to the park and played my Ukulele. I’m working on clawhammer technique.
After that I drew more exquisite corpses with the guys. They are really digging them as am I.
I then lead the web dev meeting. It was really productive. We got a nice easy project to start off on. We’ll be making a little site to capture e-mail address for people who want to be involved in a community project going on here.
At the end of the day I was even able to participate in a Super Smash Brother competition where I almost beat the #1 player once 😀
Friday
Today I ended the week with a packed day. It started off with me doing my weekly checkin with a group of rad, super smart folks, from around the world. It’s something I try and do every Friday to keep track of some personal tasks.
After school started I ended up talking to some of the boys about the web dev project introduced yesterday. I worked mainly with Tommie to help him get a Google Drive folder set up to manage everything. I feel like I’m giving these guys a massive amount of work and responsibility, I’m very excited to see them step up to the challenge (or at least try and fail well).
I half heartily watched the movie “The Fourth Kind”, it was about aliens or something, dunno… it put me to sleep.
I took a nap.
After the movie I drove some of the guys out to a park and threw containers with an egg inside off a 7.3 meter tall bridge. Two of the three crafts survived. I have failed to write a blog post on this, but I surely will.
Still have yet to finish chapter 4 of Eloquent Javascript, I’m working on the test problems.
Worked with Nick to get our new 3D printer online. We were able to connect it to the house wifi network!
I fixed a website that was having issues when people tried to access it without using ‘www’ (e.g. http://example.com didn’t work, while http://www.example.com did).
I fixed it with a simple addition to the .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
Conclusions
This week felt really good. I have been slipping on my code education, I have added my goal calendar to my phone and will start getting notifications when I’m about to hit time I set aside for study or work.
I haven’t been getting enough sleep due to screens after 11pm, which I will try harder next week to NOT partake in.