Harris Salat, from the Visual Thesaurus, interviewed me last summer. Harrris is a good interviewer, and we talked about many things that didn’t get published. He was most curious about what we call our “Alaska lifestyle,” which mostly meant salmon fishing when I spoke with him. Even though I don’t believe the word, cute, is in my vocabulary, my wife said the interview made me look good, and insisted I show it to my principal. I did that, and he told an Asst. Supt. about it. It’s a small town, and she knows me.

The published article was mostly about my classroom website. It’s been rough getting the kids ready to work on it at the beginning of the year. This is the first year that I’ve had something ready for them at the beginning (well…almost ready), but I’ve found that I also needed to get them ready for it. They need to learn a lot about working with a word processor. To keep things simple, I have them use TextEdit, which has all of its font and style settings hidden and out of the way. I want them to use it for its spell checking feature, which the website doesn’t do. I’ll show them some basic HTML formatting later. Right now, many of them are challenged with the problem of moving

the words around on the

screen, to get rid of the big spaces, and spellling. Oh, and file management is a huge problem. They lose their work. Or they label everything with their first names, or there’s no name. They forget to log out of the file server, and put their work in each others’ folders. They need a LOT of help.

Today they’re going to begin submitting stories to the Raven. I told them about writers workshop for the first time last Friday. They’ve been writing all along, but I have a process in mind that includes revision and peer conferencing - with them making choices about how to use the time. This is a new deal for them, and there was a bit of goofing off that some of them thought might be part of the program - but found out different :(

I spent the whole weekend doing a Drupal upgrade and entering their fake names as users, and rebuilding the menu in the sidebar. I found a new theme for the upgraded site. The upgrade was nerve-wracking, since the database had to be rebuilt. Everything was backed up. I only saw the “white screen of death” one time. And I fixed it without too much sweat.

The weekend was a complete blow-out to get this done. Now I have an hour before I leave for work. I have to eat and get the coffee going. I have to put together the mid-term progress reports. And, oh yeah, some lesson plans.

It’s a MONDAY. I hope it goes OK, but with the plan to get all those kids busy on the website, there’s high stress potential. One good thing, about 8 of them are out of the room with the orchestra teacher for most of the time.

Now for that coffee…