NSW Premier's Typing Challenge

Where have I been?

Well, on September 1, it is the closing date of the NSW Premier's Reading Challenge for school students and, since I've apparently done too good a job promoting the Challenge to the 400+ students I teach, I have lots of last-minute reading records to upload to the PRC website.

The organisers had been having a bit of trouble working some bugs out of their new system, so I gave the site as much time to recover as I dared, to make sure that when I did start entering data I didn't lose anything. To their credit, the organisers have made the site accessible to the students, under their own user names and passwords, this year. Our school doesn't have sufficient free computers (as in, our computers are constantly in use by classes) and of sufficient download speed, to make this an equitable shortcut, or much of a time/motion saving.

Therefore, I've been doing the data entry myself - but my clerical assistant took pity on me and spent many more interludes than her allotted library time to ease my burden. So far we are only a few off reaching last year's record of 313 completed Challenge booklets!

So here I am on the last Saturday, still cross referencing names manually with class lists to ensure I haven't missed anyone - and I note that we now also have all day Monday to keep entering data if necessary! Whew! I do have a few queries and now I have a reprieve, and can chase up missing student records on Monday.

In fact, I shall reward myself to lunch and a movie tomorrow! I'm off to meet up with my old friend, Andrew Mercado (producer of the upcoming, eagerly-awaited "Number 96" DVD boxed set) to see the documentary "Not Quite Hollywood" at Fox Studios Australia. It's the story of Australian so-called sexploitation films, including... "Number 96".