Late to work again. I seem to be stuck in my own dystopia while I work on the dystopia lesson plan. Fortunately, I finally finished the lesson so maybe the dystoppia will end. Decoding The Matrix: Exploring Dystopian Characteristics through Film is now live. That makes 33 lessons and a nice content report turned in today.
Daily Work: Lesson Plans, Meetings, and the SOTU
Continued work on the dystopia lesson plan, which uses The Matrix to explore the characteristics of dystopian society in various texts. Unfortunately, I found that part of one text was borrowed from elsewhere, so I had to redo some of the work :(
Had another team meeting and discussed what we need to do to make the network files work better for us. Watched the State of the Union address, but didn’t really think it was all that amazing. Nothing new or catchy really.
For Mac: Tweaking iTunes
MacDevCenter.com — Tweaking iTunes—some basic information on how to take control of iTunes, in case it ever gets out of line.
ReadWriteThink: March Calendar and Other To-Do Items
Apparently watching Wonderland before going to bed last night was a really bad idea. I couldn’t go to sleep for thoughts of someone breaking in and crashing my head in with a tire iron. Not good. As if I don’t have enough insane thoughts in my head.
I finished editing the March entries on the ReadWriteThink calendar. I moved our files from the old fileserver to the new server and set up some preliminary permissions. We’ll do testing and change things as needed.
Worked through a pile of little to-dos: updated the 100s chart with the latest lessons. We’re up to 32 now. I turn in a content report on the 1st, and I hope to get some more completed before then. I fixed some errors in printouts for the Story Map Interactive, and updated the list of Inbox topics to date, which I mainly use internally to figure out what I wrote in the past. Did some work on a dystopia lesson plan this evening. That and laundry.
Depression: NPR’s "The Hardest Work You Will Ever Do"
Heard “The Hardest Work You Will Ever Do” this morning while getting ready for work. It’s one of the This I Believe essays on NPR. It has some really good description of what depression feels like. The part where she talks about how it felt to have other people doing things, that’s how i feel. Course I have no one doing things for me. But anyway, I think that’s the best description. I know that I do hide a lot, even when I ask or pay people to do things for me. It feels wrong, and I feel stupid and foolish for not being able to do better. I don’t have problems like the author of this essay; but it really is a close description. So close, that I really don’t want to listen to it again, but I want to keep the URL handy.
ReadWriteThink: Political Cartoons and Raymond Carver Lessons
I finished and posted the lesson on Hopper and Carver: Outside In: Finding A Character’s Heart Through Art. It has a whole series of interactives, because of the way that the tools work. I had to create one for each painting. Otherwise, students would be printing out tons of irrelevant stuff when they worked.
I also finished my political cartoons lesson plan: Analyzing the Stylistic Choices of Political Cartoonists. It uses the same Comic Vocabulary Interactive. I also created a little interactive just for this lesson, Analyzing a Political Cartoon: “Settin’ on a Rail,” which walks through some of the analysis of an historical cartoon to help students understand the process.
Other than getting those lesson plans finished, I didn’t really get much else done. Watched Wonderland on TiVo, a somewhat disturbing movie.