Conversing for a living

I waited a little too late today to write, and now I'm more focused on what I have to do today and I don't quite remember what I did yesterday.

School was decent. I ended up having only two classes, one with the learning challenged students. There was only one student, and usually she won't speak above a whisper, but at least at the beginning of the class when I was working with her she spoke at an almost normal volume. Her reading of roman letters has really improved. In that classroom there is a Rubik's cube that I really wanted to play with, but there was a third teacher there today sitting right next to the cube, so I didn't dare. In the second class I prepared a running dictation activity which was a little too difficult for the students, but the teacher was satisfied with it. Actually, for the last twenty minutes of that period I went to have a practice conversation with a third grade student who has great academic success but apparently gets very nervous during interviews. It was a bit difficult to talk to her for that whole time since she only asked me one question, after I requested that she ask me a question.

This situation made me think--if you had told me ten years ago that I would be conversing with people for a living, I would have thought you had me confused with someone completely different. But while that's not the only thing I do, it's probably close to half. For all the time I've spent on it, I don't feel like I've improved a whole lot, but I have improved some.

After work I did some dancing and was still disappointed at my progress, and even got a bit bored so I stopped after half an hour. Yesterday was the first day that I could access my grad school coursework, so I did so and watched the introductory video. The instructor has a quaint southern accent, not unlike my mother's, and I want to ask her where she's from. I also tried to get a to-do list application, but I didn't find anything that met my specifications. I'm a bit tired of my book about Carthage, and I'm thinking about dropping it, but for a break I thought I would read some fantasy and maybe return to Carthage later, so I downloaded the Silmarillion and one other fantasy book to try. I got started on my next programming step, and then I reviewed Arabic. After that it was only 10:30 or so, but I was too sleepy to read so I went straight to sleep.

This morning I woke up at 5:30 because of my neighbor, but I didn't feel too sleepy. I have a to-do list today so I got started on it. I reviewed Arabic, watched two presentations for my grad course, did laundry, and made a grocery list. I also solved the Rubik's cube several times, enough to bring my average time for these past three days below three minutes. I did some programming, but it seems that the way I have set up my GUI is not only ugly but also extremely susceptible to bugs, and indeed I'm not even sure how to do certain things with the current structure. So my next step will be redesigning the GUI. First though, I'm going to go to the grocery store.