not a day

Who knows if that title will work? Technology is not my friend today, so it probably won’t. I have spent most of the last 10 hours trying to get Quicken Mac to Quicken Windows. Had I known when I started all this that Quicken Mac doesn’t easily convert to Windows, I’m not sure I would have ever bought the software in the first place. I am certain that I have exported, uploaded, downloaded, and imported my 5 bank accounts at least 30 or 40 times. Lord only knows how someone who doesn’t know their way around a computer would do this. Then again, someone who doesn’t know computers wouldn’t be stupid enough to have a mac and a windows machine in the first place, let alone think that they can play nicely together.

In case anyone tells you that it doesn’t pay to use Windows, explain that simply by moving from Mac to Windows my checking account balance went up $13,736.63. It only took me 2 of those 10 hours to figure out how to get rid of the extra $13,700.

When I finally get the whole thing transferred and I have the balances near reality again, I try to log on so that I can pay my bills. I used Quicken Bill Pay without problems on the Mac. Windows won’t connect. That’s another hour or so of that 10 hours. A good portion of it on the phone with tech support with a guy who claims there are only two people there and that he can’t understand what’s going on with my account. The call ended with him telling me that he has to fill out a work order or whatever cuz he can’t solve the problem. Okay. Then he tells me that it will take SEVERAL DAYS for the information to be entered and he’ll call me back Wednesday. By then, I’ll have slashed my wrists.

See? Not a good day. When not fighting with Quicken, I have people mad at me in e-mail plus e-mail about “being more hopeful” in my writing for next week. Geesh. How could you look at this day and have any hope at all? Some days I should just stay in bed.

silence

Sometimes I seem to go the whole weekend without saying anything out loud. Maybe this is in my head because of Speak, though it’s not that kind of silence. There’s just no one in the house to talk to, and I’m a hermit. I also seem to go the whole weekend in my “sleepwear” since I often don’t leave the house. (Did you know that if you wait late enough on Sunday night, it’s okay to walk your trash to the street without getting dressed?)

But back to the point, often I’m not even really thinking about the silence. I am chattering away with self-talk in my head. I’m just not saying anything out loud. Who am I gonna talk to—the plant? the refrigerator? Usually, it’s either the TV, the computer, the other computer, or my stupid self. Oh, and sometimes, general interjections caused by stubbed toes and whatnot.

Today, it was the stupid in my brain. I’m watching Dave Lieberman, who kinda annoys me but it was the best choice. I may not speak much, but if the house is totally silent it begins to grate me so the TV is usually on. So Dave is screwing around with pesto, and I’m realize that he’s just announced that he’s not using pine nuts for some daft reason and he’s using something else instead. But I didn’t hear what. So I go to the Web site. It’s walnuts. Okay. I’m not sure why walnuts, but okay. I scan the other recipes and read, “Beef Salad with Goat Cheese, Watercress and Shallot Thyme Dressing.”

“What the hell is beef salad?” my inner chatter asks. “There’s a salad I can get into. I have to check this out.”

I click through to the recipe. That’s when I spoke today.

“BEET, moron,” I say out loud to my stupid self.

The sound of my voice feels so odd suddenly. The inner chatterbox notes how long I’ve been silent. I don’t even realize I’ve been silent till I speak. The chattering certainly wasn’t silent. Even in my dreams last night, there was chattering. All night, there were dreams about the library. Earlier yesterday, I had been browsing around on the Ong Archive Blog, where there are new pictures of Ong’s Boy Scout trip to Europe in 1929. The thoughts of libraries and archives apparently took over my dreams.

Sometimes I was in the children’s section, reading various books and looking very out of place among the tweens and teens, but insistent that it was okay for me to sit and read there just the same. Other times, it was the archivist section of my brain, lost in handwritten letters and journals and notes. She was deep in reading and scanning and (even more importantly) touching yellowed pages with handwritten grooves pressed by an author no longer available, an person hidden in the text.

I’m not sure whose artifacts I was reading in my dream. I can’t even remember what they were about. I just remember the joy of touching the pages, of feeling the pen imprints, of the life there in the texts. When I look at my own pile of handwritten journals, I feel guilty for typing this. Rationally, I know that my carpal tunnel would make it impossible to write this all by hand, and yet it feels like something is lost. There’s something about looking at these archived documents in my dreams and knowing that I’m seeing a person that the general public doesn’t know, that I can discover something no one else has seen by piecing together the puzzle of artifacts. It’s the kind of dream where I wake regretting that decision I made to teach rather than be a librarian—and wishing that I had some legitimate reason to walk into some great library’s archives and touch whatever person I wanted. All those voices are silent to me. Packed up in boxes in the archives, no one to talk to.

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.

School Mistakes Huge Burrito for a Weapon

“The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos and wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.”

The higher the SAT scores, the more the house is worth | csmonitor.com

But will anyone realize that what this really tells us is how unfair the tests are to the economically-disadvantaged in the society?

Wal-Mart whips student’s parody site, from eSchool News

I’m not quite sure what I think about the situation reported in eSchool News’ article “Wal-Mart whips student’s parody site.”

Okay, sure, Wal-Mart sucks with evil unparalleled; but can you just take graphics without changing them and call it parody? Parody should change the original, no? Seems to me Wal-Mart may (sadly) be right.

Does sound like a fun assignment though—you gotta understand the site and coding to do a parody. I wish they had included links to the other parodies. Teasing me with McDonald’s and the 700 Club! Tsk, tsk!

BBC NEWS | UK | Net-illiterate ‘failing children’

Someone has figured out that “family literacy” actually means all kinds of literacy, not just book-learnin’.

Tags: digital divide |
literacy |
technological literacy |
technology

Rewriting and Editing Day

When not winning books, :) I’ve mostly spent today editing. More accurately, rewriting and editing. First, I reformatted and made minor tidinesses to a framing text for a new Kit that is to come out next week. This one is about writing at the secondary level. It won’t make the bookstore for a few more days.

I also did rewriting and editing on a new 6-8 lesson plan, Building Comprehension Word-by-Word (at least that’s it’s name right now). It uses The Hobbit for its examples, which is good because at least I’ve read The Hobbit. But unfortunately, it reminded me of what I didn’t remember about The Hobbit. Another book I guess I should re-read.

I’m a winner!

Hey, my writing actually got me something!!! Woohoo!!!

Worker Bee

Today has been a worker day. First thing, I finished up the Inbox Ideas section on Summer Reading (rough copy). It will go out tomorrow afternoon.

I updated and edited a calendar entry on Yusef Komunyakaa. It had been cut because we had already included the maximum number of entries planned for April. But given that we now have a Vietnam lesson plan and American troops left Vietnam 30 years ago this week, I wanted it back in the rotation.

After that, I edited A Bear of a Poem: Composing and Performing Found Poetry. It was a fairly clean lesson, so the process of editing, marking it up, and loading it on the site wasn’t time consuming.

Most people would have quit at that point, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wrote Developing Reading Plans to Support Independent Reading. Really, it’s an idea that I dreamed up Sunday, and my colleagues encouraged me to get it written because it fits well with the Summer Reading Inbox entry. So this evening, while watching SpongeBob and The Daily Show, I wrote it and marked it up. Then I went back and added it to the Inbox draft.

Now, surely, it’s time for bed. If I keep working like this, I won’t have anything to do tomorrow.