Unpredicted Developments

Well, I’ve been somewhat less productive today, compared to yesterday. Yesterday, I somehow worked on 4 different projects, turning in all the proposals, revising and editing a lesson, AND I think I republished my blogger site at least 2 dozen times. After much trial and error, I finally have comments and titles showing up on posts. You’d think that would be an easy accomplishment, but when I’m involved, nothing is easy.

I guess that I need to figure out what to do about the two separate sites now. I can paste over the entries from blogger to livejournal (or vice versa), but obviously I can’t synch the comments. I’m feeling conflicted about the decision. I know I need to give one of them up eventually, but for now I’m not even sure what the criteria for the decision are.

But back today. Today’s accomplishment was beginning work on a lesson plan to use at the beginning of a course or unit. The teacher pulls first lines from pieces that students will read, and the students do some prediction exercises. One of the tasks is to use think-aloud to demonstrate how someone might work through a sentence and predict what the story is about from the first line.

The lesson had the teacher narrating the think aloud, with the first sentence on the board or an overhead. I used one of the templates that MarcoPolo has provided to make an Online Think-Aloud Predictions for “Young Goodman Brown” interactive (You’ll need the Flash plug-in to see the file). And hey, if you go look at it, don’t freak out about the details there. It’s supposed to be the voice of a student who hasn’t read the story yet. It’s okay if some of the predictions and questions are not what really plays out in the story. That’s the way prediction strategies work after all!

I can’t really point to anything else that I’ve accomplished. Just spent most of the day revising and editing the text so that it fit in that tool properly. Sometimes paper-based work is more satisfying. That piles up in nice, neat stacks that look so much more tangible.

Because my life isn’t amazing enough, it’s been raining steadily most of the evening, since about 6:30 or 7. My roof has responded by leaking. There’s this lovely leak in the living room, where I know have a series of plastic washtubs lined up to catch the drippage. So now I need to find someone to repair the roof–and the plaster on the living room ceiling. The up side of all this is that the roof waited till after I’d had the house appraised. Very thoughtful of it. I guess I shouldn’t complain. But still, I really wish we’d stop having rumbly thunder. Some days I love the smell of rain and the rumbly springlike thunder. Tonight, it has me on edge. Who’ll stop the rain?