Second Week of School is ‘In The Books’

Our second week of school was a nightmare.  We couldn’t get the videos to play, the internet modem died, and I was in my second week of not smoking.

I think everyone must have started their school week last week because BJU was swamped with traffic.  Everything was taking forever to load, and once it DID load, it would buffer/freeze/buffer/freeze.  The three of us (me and the boys) were frustrated to the point of tears.  What’s worse, is that the teacher’s manuals are in pdf format, and they are secured.  So I couldn’t even print those out to teach it myself.

Picture this:  me, running to my desktop PC, reading the teacher’s manual quickly, then coming back into the classroom and trying to explain to one of the boys what their lesson is all about.  Night.  Mare.

Finally, on Thursday night, Scott took the battery out of the internet modem.  It started working.  So Friday morning, we skipped Circle Time and went directly to the videos.  They worked flawlessly.  We were thrilled that everything seemed to be working fine now…until 9:45am rolled around.  Then the videos started buffering again.  I’m assuming that’s when most people are starting to access their lessons online.  While it was annoying, it didn’t freeze up entirely, so we struggled through the lesson.

I will say that if it buffers again like that this week, I am going to call BJU and demand that they make it right.  They should upgrade us to the Hard Drive version for free considering all that we have endured with these online lessons.  And the fact that their tech support slipped up and told us that people on the west coast were experiencing the same problems, leads me to believe that they need more bandwidth for their online version.  I feel sad for those on the west coast – those of us on the east coast are nearing the end of our lessons, and those in the middle of the country are in the middle of their lessons.  By the time the west coasters log on, the system’s got to be bogged down horribly.

All was not lost though.  We did manage to learn some new things and have some fun this week.

Here are some pictures of our week:

Yes, red frosting was everywhere.  And no, it doesn’t wash off easily. 

During one of our really bad days, we gave up on the internet altogether, and I took the boys to the library for an hour.  Afterwards, I had them search for colors in nature (in our backyard).  They had a lot of fun doing this.

And last Saturday, Scott caught a Redfish: