Today I taught High School. I think it went fairly well. I wasn’t as nervous as I thought I would be. Don Smith, the supervisor from SMS, came and observed me and provided some feedback that I’m sure will be helpful to me. I felt sorry for the students because they were writing the whole hour, but I wanted to keep them busy because I knew that Don would be there and I didn’t want them getting out of hand. The class was unbelievably well behaved. I was pleasantly surprised. Usually they are monsters, but they were all at their best behavior today. I’m glad it went as well as it did.
There is a new look, for now. You all know how often I change the look, and with WP 1.5, it’s a lot easier to do so.
I also added the “Listening to” section in the sidebar via a plugin I saw at Gregory Bowers’ excellent site.
I will also be using the WP-People plug in as soon as I add people to my database. What it does is when a person’s name is put in a post, it links their name to a bio about the person. So if there is a person I talk about a lot on the blog, you can click their name and a short bio and other info will pop-up. Pretty cool stuff.
EDIT: I changed my Listening to plugin, after seeing a better, newer version on another site. Check it out here: WP-Scrobbler
I’m not feeling too well today. I feel like I have to throw up, but I’m making it to all my classes and work. Not only that, but then I’ll be going to the library to do some more research for my 20 page paper on Def Jam. I spent 2 hours yesterday looking at microfiche of Billboard from 1986 just to see when The Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill hit the charts and what it debuted at. Since this was such an independant release at the time, the only thing I could find as far as a release date was the year of 1986. Of course, it turned out to be released in November, so there was a lot of searching before of previous months before I struck gold. Now at least I know the few months of 1986-1987 to look for them in Rolling Stone. By the way, microfiche sucks. Microfilm is the way to go.
Oh, and by the way, how much ass does Google Scholar kick?
Who is Shep? Well, here is the brief story of my life.
I was born and raised in St. Louis. North County (or NoCo) to be exact. To be even more exact, Dellwood. I have two sisters, both of them older. As you can imagine, this caused a bit of trouble for me (and them) when I was young. I went to school in the Riverview Gardens School District, in which my mom was an employee of. This meant I didn’t go to the elementary school near my house, but the better one that my mom worked at.
It was 7th grade in which I was given the nickname Shep, somewhat a variation of my last name.
The nickname stuck with me when I got to high school.
Time went by and right before my freshman year of high school the family moved out to the burbs. Yes, we, like most other people from NoCo, moved to St. Charles County, just over the Missouri River. More specifically, we moved to the city of St. Peters. I started school in St. Peters. I hated my freshman year, as I was new and didn’t know anyone. Sophomore year, I really started liking school. It was this year that I met some of my best friends. I also had a teacher that made me want to become a teacher. During this time I had many variations of my nickname thrown at me. Some of them included, The Shep, Shepdaddy, Shepdogg, and Piece of Shep. The last was said as a joke and when I decided to blog I figured that it’s perfect for this website because what you are getting really is a piece of me.
College came and went quickly. It was a great time, and I will miss the people I met there. There were a lot of good times at SMSU in Springfield, Missouri, most of them involving the bar Poppycocks. I graduated from the newly-named Missouri State University in December of 2005 after concluding my student teaching at the very high school from which I graduated.
I have always enjoyed creating websites for a hobby. Most of them sucked, and like everyone else my age, I started out with sites on Geocities and Tripod. I’ve always wanted a site that could express what I was feeling, and current news for out of area family and friends. That’s when a new craze called “blogging” caught on. I started out with Blogger (a pre-google blogger even), but wanted some more functionality. This is when I started using NucleusCMS and BlogCMS. I quickly aborted those two pieces of software for the superior one that I had been researching, WordPress. I started using WP when it was in version 1.2 and continue to use it until this day.
You can find me on Twitter.
You may have noticed my site was down for a bit. Or maybe you didn’t because you don’t visit my site often enough. If that is the case, then shame on you. Anyway, hopefully the downtime has been resolved. I also have a new header up. Hope you like it. Thanks to Caleb for creating it.