I managed to actually get dressed and leave the house. Really. On a Saturday. I got dressed. Two Saturday in a row really, since I went to the holiday party last weekend, and I guarantee that I was dressed for that too. I need to gather some things for presents, mostly little things really. Also need to figure out presents for gifts at work. I began collecting for one of them, and I got the various stuff for wrapping. The cookie baking continued as well. You’d think that I have a million cookies. Really, it’s just that I’m a very slow baker. I think I wait hours between batches. I really should be more coordinated. I can’t even bake cookies properly. Geesh.

More snow, though there’s really only a few inches on the ground. It’s just persistent. I spent most of the day working on the writing metaphor lesson plan and most of this evening working on holiday stuff (checking on presents, working on recipes, etc.). My travel plans are so screwed up. I was thinking that I would go to Virginia on the 17th or 18th, but now my family is planning a caravan to Pennsylvania on the 17th to see my great uncle. Everything is all mixed up now, and I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s all a dream vision anyway. I have a lot of work to get done before I can leave here. The biggest millstone? My book has come back up in conversations at work. They want me to get a draft turned in. I still haven’t done anything with the draft since about August. Well, that’s not true. I found the draft and drove it back and forth to Virginia at Thanksgiving. It’s so hard to chop out the time to work on the draft when I’m also supposed to be meeting so many other goals at work. I feel so mixed up and uncoordinated right now. I’m not even sure that I really have a plan for the trip home. Just the idea of a plan.

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
NCTE Inbox |
ReadWriteThink

Snow…the ground is all white today. NCTE even closed an hour early. Of course, I just came home and continued working. I’m writing up a lesson that I used to do in FYC. Students explore Richard Wright’s poem “The Writer” then come up with writing metaphors of their own. I’ve customized it over the year, but it’s always been essentially the same lesson. It’s fairly basic really, but the Advisory Board for ReadWriteThink pointed out that we needed more “basic” pieces. They noticed that so many of our lessons are pushing teachers. They suggested that we add some basic lessons, so I’m going through my files and pulling out some of the things that I used to teach. They need minor changes, but most are quite close to 9-12 lessons already.

Spent the day working ahead, so that I have a little bit of a cushion regarding Inbox. I did the pieces for 12/14, 1/4, and 1/10. There’s no Inbox on the 20th because of scheduled maintenance on the NCTE machine that handles the listservs, and I get a break on the 27th because NCTE is closed for the holiday. It’s quite nice to be ahead. One less thing to worry about.

Suddenly we’re having errors that blank out entire calendar entries when the editor/writer tries to work on them. I’m at a loss for the solution. I can’t even figure out what the problem is. He’s working in the online form, so shouldn’t be bad characters copied over. He’s using IE, which works for me. It’s happened on more than one entry. I can’t duplicate it. Sigh.

I did manage to clean up the broken links from today’s report, and we did some work on an online course that we’re developing.

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
NCTE Inbox |
ReadWriteThink

I’ve begun the process of baking cookies for Christmas. I created a bunch of red and green pinwheels. More than I could actually finish baking, but I got a start. Can’t really take much credit for these. I bought red and green cookie dough, rolled it out, layered it, rolled it up like a jelly roll. They look pretty. Not your normal sugar cookie.

Wow. Tonight was the NCTE Holiday Party, an excellent opportunity for people watching. Naturally, I won one of the bottles of wine in the raffle. Why can’t I ever win things that I can actually use? The whole event is a bit awkward, since people brought dates and I don’t really have anyone to take. I hate those moments when everyone else is out dancing and I’m sitting alone and stupid at the table. Oh, and drinking water. Can anyone be more stupid and lame?

Finished editing and published the January Calendar for ReadWriteThink.

Unfortunately, I found that the javascript for the titles isn’t really working. It’s great on the pages, but not for the spiders. They’re grabbing the javascript code for the title, rather than the resulting text. Changed everything back so that the italics codes show up. At least that’s still readable. Not sure how to get around this problem. I’m going to let it stil till next week, when we have a phone call with the MarcoPolo folks who handle the WebTrends data. Maybe they’ll have an idea.

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
ReadWriteThink

Okay, I did turn in a content report today, but that wasn’t the highlight. Today was PANDA DAY! My niece and my two sisters had tickets to see baby butterstick, and there has been much happiness all around.