pedablogical

Daily Work: Rethinking Problems

Lots of ongoing work on lesson plans and such today. I handed off the March calendar and our phase 2 entries for an editor to run through. Decided how to handle the 1984 Macintosh lesson plan, and continued work on my letter to the editor lesson plan. I have a book report alternative for the letter to the editor too.

A lot of the day seems to have been about rethinking problems that we have with some lessons that have kept us from finishing them or getting feedback to the author. Several lessons had minor issues that we just needed to figure out how to manage. The most complicated is the 1984 Macintosh lesson plan, which requires the 1984 Macintosh commercial as part of the lesson. Without it, there’s no lesson. We can’t find anyone at Apple who will respond to us. Well, I have one person who will respond to me from Apple, but he’s not really helpful in this situation. I’ve finally decided to be at peace with links to the commercial online at other folks’ sites. If Apple gets angry and makes them take their sites down, we’ll have to take the lesson plan down. We’re going to gamble for now. It’s a good enough idea that I hate to lose it.

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.