Fortuitous mis-calculation

I thought that between Taiwan this weekend and Alexis coming right on the heels of that, followed by possibly the Xi'An trip, I only have this week to finish my various projects. But it turns out that my Taiwan trip is actually Aug 3-5 instead of Aug 5-8, which means that I actually have 3 days after I get back before Alexis/Xi'An. Yay!

Coding Ambitions...?

Aaargh, spent the day struggling with code. 10% success and 90% failure. I'm trying to get the essay system to pull from a standardized set of essay assignments, but that messes up half of Jon's code (namely, whenever he calls for classId since the standardized set isn't attached to a specific set). Compounding this issue is that the due dates for all of these essay assignments changes by the year, so I made a calendar table to help get the real date when given the week number. But it's not a week number because it's a week name, so I put the variable in quotes.... maybe I need to add string contatenation to the mysql query? Right now it's returning null...?

And now I just realized that adding a classid to the essay table doesn't work because what if the student changes class? So to display the essays I need to first get a class list of students and then iterate through that...

I guess a point of success was modifying a function to create new accounts for all 6th and 7th graders en masse. (Involved a mighty sql function)

So, list of coding things to attempt tomorrow, in order of importance:
- Get findDate() to work
- Change the Assignments List to link to individual classes
- Change the Teacher Grading page to only list essays of a specific class and assignment WOOT! All 3 done in about 2 hours!!
- fix grade printing pdf stuff

Hopefully I can do that without breaking Jon's code. (Then it's off to Kinmen!)

Then there's the little tweaky stuff...
- Add teacher essay link to teacher page
- Make the essay index page the student login page instead of a blank page
- Add gradebook manual entry override.
- Add "teacher option" that allows teachers to set letter grade vs. number grade. (This should follow the teacher, not the class.)
- when a student changes class, that year's gradebook entry needs to change appropriately?
- Add gradebook auto-save.
- Use date detection to open/close assignments, or at least highlight the current assignment
- make the due dates match the assignments after testing for grade level
- Fix PDF printing
- Fix the year detect so that the teacher can still print grades from December in January

And then there's the "eventually I'll do this...?"
- allow teachers to make their own drop-down ad-hoc comments
- allow teachers to print student essays
- Add email template system for teachers.
- Add re-submission feature to essay system.

On a more cheerful note

I feel like this has been a very productive summer!

- I made a new website and remodeled 2 old ones (8 days + 2 more)
- I've traveled to Georgia and Tanzania and Qatar abroad, as well as the Shanghai countryside, Suzhou, and Hangzhou. I'll be going to Taiwan and Kinmen, and hopefully Xi'An (18 days + 7 more)
- I've done some good lesson planning and will do more (2 days + 2 more)
- I feel like I know a bit more about India now (10 days)
- I've written a script and drawn some pages of a comic, and even if I drop it and go another direction with comicking, at least I've learned a lot! (14 days)

And most importantly, I've eaten a metric ton of 生煎包!

Oh hey, I just whipped up a little pie chart! :D



Although this might be more accurate: