A Vexing Problem

It is 4th Period, a planning period for Mr. Jewett and me. We had our 2nd Period Class earlier this morning. Mr. Jewett had me run the class. I sort of had a leg up on things, as we had the identical class yesterday. Things all went pretty well for the most part. We were working on Fireworks graphics. As this class is pretty advanced, we went right to the playingwithfire.com website, which has the listings of some neat graphics effects.

Most of the kids got our first two projects pretty easily, the Guilloche effect and the Spiralling grid. We then got to the project that will be posted on student's "media tech" page for credit. This is the two-tone name that we had started working on yesterday in the other class, but did not finish. One kid, H., managed to get the effect figured out, putting his name in red with a split of a Hummer in the background. It looked really good. Most of the rest of the class, though, was struggling. With some coaching, most kids started to get close. We decided to have H. walk the class through the procedure on the overhead computer.

Unfortunately, the overhead computer has the MX build, which is different from all of the other computers in the classroom. H. could not duplicate his feat. The background for his picture kept coming up inverted and transparent. We couldn't figure out the problem. The bell rang and I came to the media to try to figure out the problem. Working on it for over an hour, I still couldn't get it figured out. Later, during study hall, I tried again, with Mr. Jewett helping me. The image still inverted and went pale and we have no idea why. We will be talking with Mr. Denise, the old "computer guru," now History Teacher, to see what the problem is.

The good news is that the young lady, J., who was the one who long ago (last week) wrote "LOSER" on her screen after I prompted her to get back on task, is in this class. She was also struggling to get the project done and came up to me in study hall while I was working on it and said, "Mr. Burkhard, you can't get that done either? That was so hard!" She kind of commiserated with me for a second before running off to chat with her friends. She was very nice about it.

A few people, mostly newer kids or kids that had problems with their login password, were behind in the Scavenger Hunt Project. I had them come to the Lab for study hall to work on their project. I filled out all of the passes. Made me feel like a real teacher.