Daily Work: (or Not Work Acutally) Sick Day

I missed the Staff Appreciation Luncheon today because I was in bed feeling pretty iffy about my life. Some days, I just can’t get out of bed. Most days, even if I do get out of bed, my entire day is spent hating myself and wanting to go back to sleep where I don’t have to think about it. Today, at least, I had a raging headache to blame, so I didn’t have to go out into the world where everyone would see me. Some days, sick days are the best choice.

In the News: What Makes a Memoir?

As I was driving to work this morning, the local NPR station was talking with Philip Graham, Professor of English at the University of Illinois, and
Antonia Leotsakos of the staff of Pages For All Ages Bookstore about book recommendations (archived interview). As seems to always be the case these days, the conversation turned to A Million Little Pieces AKA the “Million Little Lies” of James Frey.

In the course of the conversation, Leotsakos mentioned that the basic issue in the Frey controversy, the question that needed to be asked, was “What makes a memoir?” Most folks know the problems with Frey’s “memoir” at this point, but the question lingered for me as a key one that could be useful in the classroom.

When we ask students to write autobiographical pieces, to what extent do we discuss the importance of truth in that project? When we push them to add specific and concrete details, do we ever ultimately push them to embellishing the truth in the way that Frey has? Memory is such a tricky thing. It’s often embellished in the retellings in ways that become socially constructed and “true” to the teller, even though they may not be truthful to the facts that an independent observer might record.

As teachers, we need to talk about the differences between truth and embellishment and how that interplay works in storytelling. I’m sure there’s an easy lesson for the site that focuses on the Frey articles; but it’s probably more important to create something that gets at the underlying issues without the sensationalism.

In the News: Book Publishing

Blurb Home: Washington Post review of a demo of the product explains that you go from “Blogs to Books, using a ‘Blog Slurper.'” The service is still in beta testing.

It looks like an interesting product, but it’s not publishing books in the Library of Congress sense of things. No ISBN, etc. You’re publishing your own book in the same way that you could if you just printed it out using your home printer. Don’t really want to knock it, but it’s sort of like saying your photo album is a coffee table book.

Now I realize that in the classroom definition of things where we talk about publishing students work, it’s clearly publishing. And it’s a book if you think it’s a book. But it felt as if they left things out. It’s just a new tool for vanity publishing.

Windows Resources: Free themed fonts – Lifehacker

Free themed fonts – Lifehacker—such a shame that I didn’t have The Matrix font when I was working on the dystopia lesson plan. Maybe one of these will come in handy in the future though.

In the News: Bush: Boost math and science

eSchool News online – Bush: Boost math and science—this initiative is why we’re internally focusing on what has been titled the “STEM learning pathway.” STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. In any other world, we’d be talking about reading and writing in the content areas or reading and writing across the disciplines (or curriculum); but in the world where the government gets to decide how things are labeled, we have STEM.

In the News: E-mail Tone

Email tone isn’t understood as much as we think – Lifehacker—of course the issue that isn’t being addressed here is how e-mail and telephone rhetorical skills compare to letter writing, memos, and so forth. There’s a move to damn what’s electronic about the communication without considering whether the issue may be the immediacy of audience and purpose that telephone communication may bring to a speaker/writer.

Web Resources: 30 Boxes Calendar Beta

30 Boxes calendar beta live – Lifehacker: This tool has possibilities for a shared calendar for IRA and NCTE as we both work on ReadWriteThink. We currently have a shareware app that lets us upload dates. This looks slicker. I need to investigate it in more detail though.

Blogging: Del.icio.us and Teaching (and Categories?)

cbd offers an explanation of how Del.icio.us and teaching go together. I wish I could get my head around del.icio.us completely. It just evades me. There’s something I just don’t get. The way the cbd explains it here made me wonder if it wouldn’t be a way for me to have categories on my blog, which doesn’t really support categories. If I chose keywords that were my categories and then tagged things, could I create category links to those entries on del.icio.us? It feels like that would work, but there’s something that makes the whole del.icio.us thing feel too complex. I think I need to sit down with someone and have him/her walk me through a site till I get it. I’m not exactly sure who that person would be or where she/he is hiding. And while that miracle person is at it, I’ll take details on how all this compares to technorati.

Depression: Late or Not?

Finally, I’m caught up. Feels like a million entries I’ve edited or written in the last 24 hours.

The most interesting observation through all this was a note on one day that I was horribly late for work, and a note on the very next day that I got in at a reasonable time. Both days I arrived at the same time. My brain is so mixed up it seems. I know that I am the poster child for black and white thinking, but normally, it’s that everything I do is wrong or stupid or horrible. Here I had evidence that I thought the same action was horrible one day and great the next—and I didn’t even notice until I read back through things. Maybe one day my brain will make sense.