Journal

Taxing Broken Links

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This entire day has been devoted to repairing broken links on ReadWriteThink. It’s usually not a horrible task, but this time there were dozens. It seems that that National Archives decided to do a site redesign.

Now generally, I have no problem with such things. Sites need to be redesigned periodically. They either outgrow their old system or they become dated. The thing is I can’t decide what the point of this redesign was other than annoying people. Many of the pages look identical in the redesign, but the links are broken.

Okay, I know that file structures need rethought occasionally, but these were just stupid changes for such high profile pages. For instance, some of these links are broken because they changed underscores to hyphens:

OLD: http://www.archives.gov/national_archives_experience/charters/bill_of_rights.html

NEW: http://www.archives.gov/national–archives–experience/charters/bill_of_rights.html

Your tax dollars at work. Oh, and notice that they DIDN’T change the underscores in bill_of_rights.html


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Journal

Characters in Because of Winn-Dixie: Making Lists of Ten

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Finished editing and posted a new 3—5 lesson, Characters in Because of Winn-Dixie: Making Lists of Ten. Believe it or not, it’s not my lesson. I know you see “Lists of Ten” and think it’s mine, but somehow that lesson plan seemed too obvious, so I didn’t even think about it. Fortunately, my colleague did. In the book Because of Winn-Dixie, the protagonist, Opal, learns about her absent mother when her father shares ten things about her. This makes a lasting impression on Opal; and later in the novel, when Winn-Dixie is missing, she makes here own mental list of ten things about her dog. In this lesson, students create their own lists of ten to summarize the features of a character.


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NCTE Inbox

You’re Not Allowed to Read That Text!

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The Ideas section for this week’s Inbox ties to several censorship stories in the news. A little quote from the intro to the section:

Censorship is in the news this week — from the accusation of “absolute vile and gratuitous sexual premises” in the books targeted in the Fayetteville, Arkansas, high school library to a profane word in the title of a poem in a Seattle, Washington, high school literary magazine. In situations like these, the true issue is the power of language and the control over who is allowed to use it.


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Journal
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Giving up for the weekend. I’m not sure where any of it’s going. I’m beginning to think that when I get the eleven characteristics done, I’ll resturcture the entire section, removing the characteristics altogether. There are overlaps in the ways that they’re covered that just end up being redundant I think. But I’m really not quite sure. I’m only on #4, so I’m not even through half of them. I hoped that I could finish this chapter this weekend, but I’m doing nothing but struggling with it.

Current status
Pages: 27 of the needed 125 (21.5%)
Words: 5584