October 19, 2005 by

The Ideas column for this week’s Inbox focuses on pieces that tie to speakers who will be at NCTE’s Annual Convention in Pittsburgh.

Spent today setting up the new ReadWriteThink calendar entries for FY06. In the past, we’ve gone month by month, adding new entries each month as seemed appropriate. Now that we have gone through that process twice, we have a solid number of entries for each month. For this fiscal year’s grant, we looked over the entire calendar. Some weeks ago, I added all of the entries to a wall calendar so that we could see any overall gaps in the greater scheme of things (e.g., weeks without enough entries).

We also looked for gaps in coverage on the whole site. For instance, what authors or kinds of writing did people expect a language arts site to include that were not yet covered adequately in the lessons and/or calendar. We have 30 entries to add over the course of three phases. The new pieces will include authors such as Alice Walker, Amy Tan, and Walt Whitman (as well as some picture book authors and important events).

To set up these entries, I added them all to the calendar, but not marked live of course. I had to hack some ASP to create running lists of the three phases, which took most of the afternoon. Odd how something that takes 5 seconds to say takes 5 hours to do. I ended up having to do a supremely silly nested if-then that handcoded the dates. There’s no field in the database that I can use to indicate they’re in one of these phases, and I’m too much of a scaredy pants to add a field to the table. One day, I really need to figure out how to play around with SQL, but I’m so afraid to do anything when the only working database I have access to is the site’s database. But back the to point, the new entries are under development and should be 1/3 published by the end of the year, and the rest over the course of several months next year.

I guess that I left out that I took numerous breaks to put up those new Halloween decorations. I should get a picture. It’s intriguing because we never managed to get the ladder to take down the snowflakes from last Christmas. That means we have ghosts, pumpkins, bats, spiders… and snowflakes hanging from the ceiling now. I need to dig under the desk and figure out what other pumpkinish things I have to pull out.


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