Possumblog

A joy and relief comparable only to that of no longer having to buy baby diapers.

Last night, I found out that both Rebecca and Ashley had papers that needed to be typed. Obviously, they had to be typed and turned in today. Up until now, this would have meant that I was typing this entry with possibly only four hours of sleep the previous night. HOWEVER, such is not the case.

I made them do their own stinkin' papers.

Now for Middle Girl, this isn't that big of a deal now, since she had the good sense to sign up for typing at the middle school. She's comfortable working on a computer now, and has tolerable speed and accuracy, and knows how to format and all that stuff. Hers took a while, even though it was only a few pages, but I'm pretty confident she did okay. The only problem she had was understanding that she DID have to type it last night, because it's due tomorrow, and we have church tonight, and there's no time left to type. She finally figured that out, though.

For Oldest, a somewhat different story, in that she refuses to believe that she cannot type, even though she's never had a class. She also seems to think she knows everything about computers. Fine. Fair enough. Go type it yourself.

Approximately 30 seconds later, "DAAAAAAD!!"

::sigh::

"I CAN'T GET IT TO CENTER ON THE PAGE! IT WON'T! GO! DOWN! THE! PAGE!"

She'd typed her name and the title of the paper, and was trying to use the down arrow key to make it go down the page. I showed her the enter key. "BUT IT WON'T GO DOWN THE PAGE!" Yes, it will. Look. See? Down the page. See?

Obviously she couldn't admit she didn't know how to work the thing, so she switched to complaining that the print preview view of things didn't look right. "It is, sugar. Just type. And remember to save it every few minutes. You don't want to have to type it all over again." (See--I preach a good sermon on salvation! Just because I won't heed my own advice, well...)

Five minutes later--"DAAAAAAD!!"

::sigh:: All this time, I am trying to simultaneously a) get Cat in the tub, b) read her a story while she bathes, c) help fix supper, d) help Rebecca with a math problem, and e) answer Boy's unceasing list of questions about items of concern only to him.

"Yes?"

"IT WON'T! DO! ROMAN! NUMERALS!"

"Okay, hold on." At this point I was mostly involved with items a) and b), so I had to make sure Cat wasn't going to go wandering off around the house nekkid and dripping bathwater, so after I had her suitably tasked, I went downstairs to find that Mom and Rebecca had made the mistake of trying to help Oldest, which only resulted in turmoil.

"Okay. Paragraph. Bullets and Numbering. Hmm."

She was on the downstairs computer, which only has an old version of Works. No quick way to Romanumeralize lists. "Okay, well, just type in an I. and tab over. Simple."

After that, she was on her own.

Took her forever, but she finally did finish up around 11:30 last night and brought it upstairs to print on my printer. She went on off to take her shower before bed and I opened up her file.

"SIMLARTIES BETWEN..."

::sigh:: Apparently the idea that her spelling might be wrong never occurred to her, thus negating the need for running spell check. Did that. Then, the outline--what a mess. Fixed that, and used tabs as I has originally shown her, rather than her use of four, five, six, or seven space bar hits. And this was for each heading--none of them had the same number of spaces. Then on to the body--all single space, which I thought was odd, considering every other paper she seems obsessed with making sure I double spaced it. "Hey, did you need this double spaced?"

"Uhh--I guess. I suppose so."

Double space. Then fixed the citation page, again a mess of untabbed indents. Save, print. The only thing I didn't correct was syntax and grammar, or her specious reasoning--I figure her teacher should bear some of this burden along with me.

All in all, though, much more pleasant than it would have been had I been called upon to do all the typing.

Two down, two to go.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at November 30, 2005 01:33 PM