Sunday, March 06, 2005

The Best Laid Plans of a Life-Long Procrastinator...

...don't really get too far past the 'plans' stage. Duh.

Obviously I stayed up WAY too late last night (almost 2am!), doing nothing productive.
This morning I was up fairly early (but only in an ideal world would that mean that I will be tired enough to go to sleep at a decent time tonight). And so far I haven't really done anything.

I just spent a good hour reading a column on collegehumor.com, and then checking out emotioneric.com. I finally closed the window once I hit 'kicking ass and taking names,' when I proceeded to guffaw out loud for two minutes, tears threatening to come out of my eyes. No more!

Back to work!

Or maybe...not yet!

Yesterday morning I finally watched Napoleon Dynamite. Have you seen pictures of normal-looking Jon Heder? He's adorable. Napoleon is one weird dude, but sort of lovable. The dancing was indeed pretty fucking awesome.

I also watched Win a Date with Tad Hamilton, but that's because I lurve Topher Grace. Cute, intelligent, wry humor=my perfect man.

So far today I've made a list of all the things I need to do. That's really most of what I've done. I have my lesson plan page up, ready to be filled out by genius ideas of teaching.

This week is going to be really complicated. The assessment tests from Friday did not get finished, so I have to give them time to complete them on Monday. Then I'm supposed to have them all evaluated in time for Friday's 'test sophistication.' Also, we have the springtime computerized assessment test to give this week, too. But I shouldn't do it on Friday, so that I can at least pretend to teach them skills and strategies for the big test a month hence.

All of that test-taking crap is going to have to go into the reading workshop, so that we can get some work done on the stories the kids are supposed to write.

I think I should start off the week by finishing up some of the character stuff. The kids didn't really seem to get the action stuff that I talked about on Thursday. So maybe I'll figure out some activity to do with that on Monday. I've started a 'fill-in-the-blank' action verb/adjective/adverb that hopefully will get the kids practicing using interesting language to describe their character. That homework can be to describe how your character would have dinner or something.

Then I want to start moving into plot, and do that the rest of the week at least. Next week we can finish that up and touch on setting.

Eventually it will be time for detailed revision and edits. We will talk about leads and conclusions and grammar and stuff. I vow to do a better job of that this time around.

Then, it will be time for the final draft of the story, and I will publish them into class anthologies.
So that puts a rough estimate of the finished product at around the end of March. Not bad, I suppose. That actually fits nearly perfectly, since the new 10-week plan was supposed to start Feb 1. That will give me April to do the literary letter, which is the second product of this 'unit.'

See, look at me figuring things out. Writing here helps me flesh out my ideas and decide what to do or not to do.

Wow, this has been a completely worthless post. Good for me, very bad for you. I apologize, readers. Go back and read the older stuff if you haven't already.

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