Gathering Data

During my drive to work each morning I pray, a lot! I pray for grace in the way I handle all things that come my way and that I will have mercy on others. I'm so glad I got into this routine during my previous drive (45 minutes one way) and have maintained it, though I have a much shorter drive now (20 minutes). It has been a trying week, time, and start to the new year. Over the past week I have worked feverishly on the computer to get courses put in the right way so that the number of red flags are decreased in our student information system. Yesterday I spent nearly half the day working on concurrent enrollment courses, creating them all, entering them into transcripts and making sure they were all the way they should be within the students' schedules. Right at the end of what I was doing I noticed a student already had concurrent enrollment class listed (what!) and I didn't enter it. I questioned the principal (who had asked me to take care of that the afternoon before) and he told me he completed three of the four courses (but didn't bother telling me). I wasted 1/2 a day doing that! Ugh. Another situation happened today that was very similar, again, with the same person. Thankfully, I'm prayed up and so my frustration level remained low. I was able to interact with the students quite a bit over the past week which got me out of the office and time away from the computer. I stepped into several classes to have students complete interest inventories on mynextmove.org. This site is great for giving all kinds of information on careers, career fields and much needed data to go with it. I usually use just a portion of it to get a general idea of careers in which middle school students are interested. I have a few stragglers that were absent. I'd like to get their information by the middle of next week so that I can start putting together professionals for career cafe. A few parents came and went over the week, I spoke to many others on the phone. I registered all seniors for a local college fair coming up on Sept. 13th. The kids were so great about changing schedules (some as many as four times - not their choice) and informing classmates who were absent or other places the day we registered or completed inventories.