2010

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Junior High School News. Time to introduce Marque.

Marque was essentially the replacement for Chris R. At the end of the 2008-2009 school year, and I mean right at the end, Marque came in for a few weeks to fill the missing lunch duty spot. This position would then carry over to the current school year.

Marque is the kind of guy everyone gets along with so I don’t remember having any real issue with him at the start of the year, I felt bad for Chris R, but here we were. Marque had previously been working at the Davis Teen Center, which at this point had been called Third and B since those terrible Teen Center questioners I had to endure back in the 1990s.

Well the old center had to shut down and that was what led Marque to us in the first place. While at Third and B he had been doing some video(ish) activities for the kids that showed up there in the afternoons that was sponsored by some state program mandating that the local cable access channel had to give back x amount of time and resources to local education. So, during his first few months at Harper he started trying to work that angel into something at Harper.

I don’t remember all the details he went through during startup. I know that the district liaison heavily tried to move him to Emerson, and that somewhere lost in the annals of video footage to time there were some videos Marque had shot at that school. But Marque had settled in with me and Dino and so he kept pushing to get some equipment to be able to make some sort of video project, which then got picked up by the Leadership class.

It was his struggles with the equipment where I found out about this. Not that Marque was computer illiterate, but it was in dealing with “tech” or district IT in which he found himself at a loss. Marque had written a small proposal and been given four older PC towers and then had ordered some equipment and budget software to startup the program with. Before installing the hardware at all he had installed the software and was having a hard time finding it.

I guess I should be more clear I think he tried to install it once, couldn’t find it on the computer, had given it to the district to get installed with the custom software, then couldn’t find it, and then here we were  sometime in the late fall sitting in what was an old storage room having the situation explained to me.

The problem there was that whenever one installed the software, everything would look fine. But the second you would logoff or restart the system the district network and computers would basically hard reset to what they thought the computers should have one them. So his Adobe Essentials programs along with a couple others would consistently be removed from the system.

After understanding the problem and being told they would turn off the system doing that and then not a couple more times a discussion came up about ways to circumvent the district IT which obviously, even though they would say they would help, was obviously going to then just delete the software because it wasn’t on their list of acceptable software.

The idea Marque decided to have me make an example of was to reformat and take one of the computers off the network. Which quickly snowballed into, what if we just set up the four computers on their own network off the school network. The only downside being no internet, which was fine at the time because if we took the computers off the district logins governing the internet was a whole new headache, we weren’t keen to deal with anyway.

Another bonus was that being off the internet and external networks was we could maybe use higher end software pulled off the internet at home, giving the students access to more realistic tools for video editing and the like. The hope being that using it solely for education would be fine if there ever was an issue. (Which spoiler, there never was).

So we were able to install the larger hard drives and video cards into the older systems, and then load them up with windows XP and the adobe creative sweet and some other capture devices Marque ordered to test out.

While this was going on Marque had been able to pump out a few episodes of the news for consumption by teachers is they chose to show them in class. Things weren’t well defined at that time. However, because of all of the onsite issues up to that point, He was doing all the video editing and effects on his own at the local cable station after hours. Now as we crossed into the new year Marque was able to boast to all the higher ups, which was plenty in this case, the Leadership teacher, the principle, the liaison from the district and the cable station, that the kids were now able to not only film, but edit and develop their pieces from start to finish.

 

https://youtu.be/FQ_aB1RYro4

So, we have a copy of the first broadcast, edited of course by Marque. I don’t actually remember which episode that changed. But on our fancy wallpaper Lyndsay made for her and Matt, we can start to see that the kids getting more involvement with the process beyond just filming.

Matt and Lyndsay technically weren’t even part of the program itself. They were guinea pigs that were assigned cross-age, which is a program I don’t think even runs anymore. Cross-age was a class were a couple of kids would have a period to go spend at the nearby elementary school, helping out a teacher with assignments. Somehow, and I don’t remember who was their supervisor on our end anymore, anyway, somehow, they managed to either get permission or manipulate themselves into getting permission to come help out with editing most of the week. While not great for the cross-age program, they tested a whole world of new ideas Marque and I had for leadership at the time and showed that there was some demand for kids that wanted to focus on projects like this.

In fact, their behind the scenes testing with me sixth period helped lead to the most ambitious project with the kids that we tried that season: Live broadcasts quarter four. So, the pinnacle of year one of the news program was the only couple times we ever did live broadcasts of the videos.

Here they are, after sneaking themselves into the second live broadcast. But the live broadcasts were the culmination of the first year of the FEW Harper news.

Marque, always able to be intoxicated with new ideas, sold administration on the idea once I went over how it would be possible. The funny part of the whole situation is that setting up the live broadcasts is completely indicative of how Marque and I worked together. I didn’t set up the room for a live broadcast because that was our goal. Instead, I brought up the theoretical way we could set up the room for it and then Marque told everyone we could and would do it.

Too boot with the setup being a theory I had to get functional, for some reason we set, or got set a two-week deadline to make it a reality. Whether Marque promised the quick turnaround of doing things in this new way, or it was mandated to him is not really know. The only real reason to note this is that the two-week window would become the set rule for the next eight years.

So, enter our players, as of writing this I can remember that there were five students involved for the cast. I remember Christina was one of the anchors, as well as Alyssa. They have been easy to remember since they were front and center on camera. After that I remember Micheal working one of the boards, but the last two, who hopefully I will list here (Honeychurch, Micheal, and ___ ), I had to remember.

Also of note here was Geron.

So like Lyndsay and Matt, we had another  ghost broadcaster. Geron was another weird case of how he got involved. In the above picture he is doing his “science report” for the second live broadcast. This came about from issues he and his science teacher were having in class. Once again Marque had somehow taken on Geron as sort of a tutor outside of class for him, since for whatever reasons I don’t remember he wasn’t allowed back in class. Then Marque had some outside responsibility that impeded and I just started doing Geron’s astronomy assignments with him instead.

Then of course to make things work together, we molded those into the video bulletin, thus allowing him to create projects for the class and teacher he was in through another classes’ projects. It was a strange setup, and I remember having to go by his science class to see what was okay and not okay for him to cover, but it got him through the year and gave the kids practicing the live broadcast another segment and another person to cover having to be in front of the camera like:

Racheal, who ended up being stuck with having to start the live episodes. Our last cast member that wasn’t assigned to the project was Racheal. She simply had the honor of doing the daily announcements everyday and so we thought it would be a good fit to have her start of the live episodes with the daily announcements, since we were taking up that spot in the day with the live broadcast. She would read the bulletin then give way for the anchors to come on and start the planned out episode. That makes Five students in charge of the broadcast, Two on camera talents, three pushing all the buttons, and four helpers from other places to make the episodes go.

https://youtu.be/Knk-vEgF5g8

unfortunately, the YouTube channel disappeared in 2022, so I can’t just instantly pull up the videos online. Instead, I am having to go through what backups I still have available for any footage.

For what it was, broadcast one was a resounding success. So much so that we lined up the suspects to do broadcast number two. While of equaling quality, not being the first did hurt this broadcast. Teachers, okay with indulging in the oddity once cared less the second time. Without as much fear of failure for turn two the kids were a little more relaxed, which too adults doesn’t seem as professional, even though more real. So it was with that broadcast that as the year ended, the live setup got shelved and we never game back to it.

Now, not getting all the teachers on board to stop class at the same time was a major factor, however another major reason for never re-exploring the live broadcasts came from live streaming still being clunky and not mainstream enough and our regular cable lines at the school having to be converted for digital broadcasts, which required more converters and logins to accounts not everyone was sure about to get running the same. So, starting with season two we would just do pre-recorded episodes, one every two weeks.

While all this was going on at work with the video bulletins, a mad transition from the foreclosed house on Lafayette to living at Sharps and Flats and the court case around it were going on away from work.

The 2010 side of that ordeal was something else. We are already established in a house with one freeloader friend of the landlord using the bankruptcy status to have a free place to stay, who has been increasingly causing issues with roommates, especially Alex whom by 2010 is also unemployed and stuck in the house with him. And then we have the whole foreclosure thing.

I think it was at the beginning of February that we got the posted sign to be out in like three days now that the house had cleared through all the landlords defaults. Obviously, that wasn’t a reasonable timetable, but of course when dealing with the poor versus land ownership, unreasonable is sensible in the eyes of the law. So, we had to take to finding out what our rights were and so on in the situation. I attended one meeting in Woodland on this, and the time was extended to a court hearing date, which I think was around the middle of March.

I was fine to go through what we needed to extend our time and so on. But I didn’t trust the legal system too much in this case, so I also started looking for a new place immediately, which in Davis, as always is very hard off-season. Looking for a February opening on a lease is just not how the system works in town so it can take a bit.

I was able to find a room shared with something like five girls and one guy along with a dog in a complex called Sharps and Flats, Which I jumped on and moved into as quickly as I could. By the time of the trail I had actually already moved out but showed up because the other guys were still hunting. Anthony found another place pretty soon, but it took Alex if I recall the whole time we could get to find a location. I think Anthony moved out of Davis, which helped him.

The trail, which was a joke by the way, like I thought, no matter what the law says, if you’re using housing law to protect yourself, the law is protecting however owns the land. But thankfully for those involved the gave everyone until the end of the month, because being a hard ass over one-sided laws can led to disheartened former tenants and I think they might have been worried about that. I had some stuff I still needed to move into storage, but most of that wasn’t a hassle for me.

The big highlights with the move out was that our bad roommate had some fit and broke my floor lamp in some unseen fit of rage. Possibly provoked by the U-Suck banana. However, the banana might have come afterwards. The banana being the real highlight. Jim years before had a whole scheme with Nik’s banana when the Silvara guys were living on Isla Drive in Davis. It involved writing messages in Nik’s ripe banana’s for him to find days later at breakfast once the banana’s ripened a bit.

Our crappy roommate having a similar banana fetish gave me ample opportunity to pull the same trick on him for those left having to move with him’s amusement. I carved out a nice U-suck into the banana to find on my way out the door.

I think I also added a large amount of salt to his powdered milk, or something like that he used enough of to piss-off Alex. A parting gift for a terrible human on the way out.

Leaving the house and moving into the Apartment would spark me into the New Facebook time of human existence. I had to that point only begrudgingly added myself to the website to work on projects at school. But starting in April I would start cataloging some of the extensive photos I had from the early part of the last decade on there for everyone to have access too.