renaming, rethinking, and revising

So “Building Comprehension Word-by-Word” became “Focusing Reader Response Through Vocabulary Analysis.” And other than that, there has been no writing. There has been gathering. I needed to get a head start on the Ideas section for next week’s Inbox, so I gathered all the articles Thursday and Friday. I may need to find some lesson plans to go with the articles. We’ll see.

I got some feedback on the various proposals that I turned in a couple weeks ago. The response is generally good, but one of the proposals seems to have grown from a 20 to 30 page, single-spaced document to a much larger endeavor. Good, but scary. Now I’m rethinking the resources that I gathered and looking at restructuring everything. Here I thought I knew exactly what I was doing, and now I’m back at the beginning again. I think I’ve gone through and rejected several dozen books. Nothing seems both current enough and approachable enough. Anything practical is dated before it gets printed it seems.

I have lesson plans to write too. I was working on a lesson on profiling a technology. The idea was that you worked through a heuristic to interrogate a technology–who uses it, how, why, and so on. Could be a technology that the student uses/sees used or it could be a technology in novel/short story. I can’t get the thing going though. I have the heruistic all done, but it feels gimmicky. I’m not quite sure how it relates properly to English classes. Maybe I could turn it into a tech writing activity of a sort. But that doesn’t feel quite right either. I guess I need to play with it a lot more, but instead, I watched Starsky and Hutch on TV.