Zanaya has been skipping classes at school, talking on her cell phone while in class, and showing up for school without her uniform. I had to take her home, and now I don’t know what she is going to do. We seem to be headed toward her dropping out of school altogether. At some point she is going to need to gain some maturity and suck it up. Nobody likes high school, but she seems to be convinced that she is the only one.

Let me move on here. This is getting to be painful.

I have begun doing exercises on FreeCodeCamp.com after laying off their site for a while. I got hung up on one particular project that required me to work with the twitch.tv API. In the end, I gave up on it and submitted a half-assed project that doesn’t work. I printed across the page:

“I…give…up…on…this…project”

I then moved on to some of the intermediate JavaScript exercises, which I also don’t understand. I have to say that I am in a very frustrating space where JavaScript is concerned. Maybe I should move on to a language like Python which is supposed to be simpler. Apparently YouTube is powered by Python. It would be nice to use a coding language I can actually write. I feel like, with JavaScript, I know enough to copy and paste and fiddle with it a bit. I have no confidence in my ability to actually write the code from scratch. Maybe I’m just being impatient. Ah, who knows. The best I can do is keep on moving forward.

I’ve run across a few posts lately - mostly on GitHub - that complain about FreeCodeCamp’s reliance on CodePen for its projects. CodePen, in my opinion, doesn’t allow people to learn how to put together full HTML pages. As I create these projects it really is up to me to take the next step to post these pages elsewhere. This is one of the advantages of GitHub Pages - I can create websites on demand. As it is I have a portfolio site and a blog, and I certainly can publish nearly as many sites as I want. It might be best, though, to use these projects to better develop the portfolio site. In fact, I really should re-do the entire portfolio in order to highlight my coding skills in addition to my teaching materials. The site looks a bit too simple as it is.

The current rough outline of the site has a homepage as well as pages for teaching, scholarship, and music. For now I should pare it back to just teaching and coding, adding music and scholarship when I feel better able to put together substantial pages. A coding page will be easier to produce given that I have created a few projects in CodePen. Rather than giving each project its own page, though, it would be best if I can create one larger page with scrollspy navigation. In fact, let me start working on it now.