Tuesday and Chaos Reigns in Mr. Denise's Class

We had Odd Period classes today. I spent the 1st Period working with my class on finishing up their PowerPoint slides on their Computer Terminology. Most groups seem to be getting the hang of things. It went pretty well.

Third period came. It was Mr. Denise's last day in the class, teaching Templates and Colors. He is much more "no nonsense" than Mr. Jewett. He told the class today that he would be grading the projects today, that's it. No do-overs, no late work, etc. He also explained (between yesterday and today) exactly what a student needed to do to pass the assignment: 1) Have a link on their Projects Page to their Museum. 2) Have a links bar in their museum that connected to an artist page, a contact page, an "about us" page and a gallery page. Even if there isn't anything on those pages, if a page comes up, the student will pass.

"Get to work!"

Boom!

Kids start freaking out. "I can't load this!" "My links are all broken!" "My menus won't link!" "I can't find my pages!" It was nuts. Mr. Denise and I tried to help kids put stuff together for 1 1/2 hours. We were minorly successful.

At the end of the class period, Mr. Denise said, "These kids don't know what they are doing!" Many of the kids have some of the techniques for the programs down, but have no concept of file management. File names contain spaces (which they aren't supposed to have,) file names are default file names (one kid has about 23 files in his web folder, all named "Untitled-1, Untitled-2, Untitled-3, etc.,) files are partially saved on the server and part saved on the Desktop (the desktop is temporary file storage only,) files are named idiotic things with no correlation to reality (one kid's homepage for his art museum is called "mrpoopy.html") You get the idea.

Even though the kids have been shown a ton of times how to upload their stuff to the web server for grading, at least half of the kids don't know how to do it at all. I don't understand, really.

Mr. Denise says that we probably need to take time out to set all the kids straight again. We need to start at the basics and cover them one more time, at least. Kids need to completely clean out their folders, organize their files and throw away all the junk that they don't need anymore. We will likely start doing this very soon.

What a chore.

After school, I went to the wrestling match. It was a home match against Lincoln. I have never been to a wrestling match before. It was pretty exciting. We won, I think, but I don't know the score. (Heck, I don't even know how to score, but I fun anyway...)