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.

why do i do these things?

The Movie Of Your Life Is Film Noir

So what if you’re a little nihilistic at times? Life with meaning is highly over-rated. Your best movie matches: Sin City, L. A. Confidential, Blade Runner

If Your Life Was a Movie, What Genre Would It Be?

Lunch: Chicken Fried Rice
Fortune: “Life to you is a dashing and bold adventure.”
Lucky Numbers: 14, 15, 18, 24, 36, 45

Meaning: You have 14 things to do at work, 15 errands to run, 18 things to do at home, 24 minutes to do it in, 36 minutes before you receive the materials you need to complete the work, and a 45% chance of someone being angry when you don’t get it all done. “Life to you is a dashing and bold adventure”? No shit. You’re dashing around trying to get it all done and bold enough to post that fact online.