Thank you for following along the last four years! If you want to follow me elsewhere, this is my writing blog and this is my fledgling teacher blog. Keep in touch!

5/27/11: These are my official “empty classroom” pictures. I am hoping that this is my last experience with the portables. I want to be In The Building next year, especially with a Promethan board! Imagine — indoor plumbing, not worrying that my classroom door is unlocked, not worrying when my kids go to the bathroom, not worrying about someone trying to burn down my classroom …

The maroon thing in this picture next to the closet door is a curtain. That is a second closet, and it had no door. It kept bugging me, so I hung up a curtain.

Why do I think of this now? Because I am sitting here at lunch, with applesauce, and I put some of my Cheerios in it. I caught myself doing that a couple of weeks ago as well. Since Cheerios are bland but crunchy circles, and applesauce has some taste but no crunch and not much body, they actually go pretty well together, in an Odd Couple sort of way. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I’d eat this if I were at home and had plenty to choose from, but I’m sitting in my classroom and it’s … not bad!

I am going nuts trying to finish up my (on-line technology) school project that’s due tomorrow. I made it more complicated than it needed to be for the assignment. Really, it just has to be a lesson or two that go together, but it takes a lot more than that to take my students from being totally ignorant of technology to doing internet research and creating a PowerPoint presentation. The other part is that we have to do it in a way that any teacher can replicate, because it’s going into a database. On the plus side, 12/21 students have finished their individual set of 3 slides, and one is in progress. Plus there are 12 school days left, not counting today.

For those who are counting, there are 22 school days and 35 calendar days left of school.

Highlights of the week? Hmm. 4-5 children filled in a random letter on the front of their answer booklet instead of the letter matching their test book. Their success on the test worries me if they can’t even follow the directions before the book is opened. One left off one letter of his four-letter first name. He later decided that there was no need to write down math problems to solve them; he would try to do them in his head instead. He must have a very speedy head, because he just zipped through the math test, finishing quicker than people who had actually passed math chapter tests this year. It’s a miracle. Putting test answers and sample problem answers on the wrong tests added to the joy of the week. One girl complained she was nauseous and in my most caring manner I pointed out that she was more than welcome to go throw up as soon as she answered the only question she had left. Heartless? Maybe. But any test questions left unfinished on the test on progress are therefore marked wrong. She made up the second test today, and I think she was done as quickly as miracle boy. Etc. Each night I went home, exhausted. I accomplished nothing noteworthy this week, and even had a hard time keeping up with my A to Z Challenge entries. I still haven’t done today’s.

In other news. I’m taking a 6-week technology standards course on-line through the state. I’m really liking the class. This past weekend I had to take an assessment (a pre-test that I think is used for high school students). Some of it was hands-on application stuff and some was questions. Personally, I thought it was a lot of fun (the hands-on part). So yesterday I got my score back. I got every question right. Every one. Woot! It’s not for a grade as far as I know, except for getting credit for having taken it when I was supposed to, but still!

As part of that class, we have to do a unit project with our class. I decided that I’m going to have my students’ final research projects be presented in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. Today was my observation by my supervisor, so what I did was create a PowerPoint this past week, which was also fun. It included a lot of bad or so-so examples. They had a note-taking sheet that we wrote down key ideas based on what I did right or wrong, that will help them when they do their own. Then on the back they drew two slides of their own, of a “bad example” and a “good example” and they shared them with each other. My supervisor is great at observations, because she participates as well. She did her own examples and shared them with some of the kids. My hope is that when they do their final presentations, their families and our administration can come. Wouldn’t that be cool, to live in our neighborhood and come to school and see your 4th grader’s group PowerPoint? Especially since they have no computer class at all and very little access to technology.

Life is full of teachable moments, though. I told P that no, I would not go to anyone and ask them to make a soccer team. However, he was more than welcome to write a persuasive letter to the principal and get others to sign it, and that we call that a petition. He is also one of the first kids done with math every day, so today when he was done I let him know that it was an appropriate time to work on that letter. A number of students helped him with some great ideas. Then, right before lunch, P and another student (L) took the letter to two other classes (I called first) and presented the letter to them. They got a lot of signatures. They will ask the rest of fourth grade and perhaps other grades as well at recess.

In the meantime, yesterday afternoon, we played soccer during “fake PE,” which is amusingly called “extended recess” by the state or district or someone else who’s fairly clueless. It isn’t extended recess, because there is no free time involved. The entire class must be engaged in an activity at the direction of the teacher, who isn’t qualified to teach PE (and thus saving the district lots of money that would be spent on an actual PE teacher). We play soccer because we work on sportsmanship (soccer can be brutal in this neighborhood; I’ve had students with multiple concussions during recess) and playing for fun, as opposed to any cut-throat version. One girl (who whines about everything anyway) complained that she didn’t like soccer. “I don’t like to play soccer because I’m a girl.” Really???? Because my brother coaches girls’ soccer, and they have a great time. Liking or disliking soccer isn’t a gender thing. Heck, if i were still young enough to run, I’d love this game! Instead, I get an occasional kick in but otherwise sort-of coach and cheer the kids on.

So today, we’re told to have grade level meetings with no guidance about the topic at all (usually we have the full staff meeting, and when we are to have grade level meetings they tell us what to talk about). During the meeting, one teacher was called to the library. I later found out that TEN teachers were notified that they are not returning to our school next year. I was not on that list. We recently got an e-mail about a district job fair sort of thing, and they can go to that to talk with principals of other schools who may have an opening.

The district is opening a new school in spitting distance from our current school — a state-of-the-art school with all sorts of technology. Yeah, imagine if we had technology! It would be cheaper to provide us with those things than to start an entirely new school. It is supposed to be K-8, but no one is really sure if they will have all of the grades ready by fall, since they only recently started the construction. But this means that we are projected to have around 250 fewer students next year, at least. This does not mean, however, that job losses were based on being equally divided among the grades or anything; it was entirely based on the formulas.

Some weird guy came by panhandling a short time ago.

The way it works at Smashwords, where Rolled-Up Streets is published, is like this: First you have to write a book. Um, yeah, you suspected as much. It has to be an original book by you, and it can’t be some cheesy get-rich-quick sort of thing. Next you have to format it properly. This is the more time-consuming part, especially if you wrote the book a while ago and have to undo things. For example, using TAB to indent is bad. Using the “format paragraph” feature to indent the entire document is good. So you have to do a search/replace and delete the tabs (which can be done quickly by typing ^t in the search and nothing in the replace, and hitting replace all). Then you have to reformat it with the format paragraph thing.

Next, get rid of all headers and footers, including page numbers. This is different from print formatting. E-books come in various formats and readers use various fonts, and the first thing e-book readers notice is that there are no page numbers. But you also have to go in and make sure you have no more than 3-4 hard returns in any place, which took me a while (as did removing the page breaks). You can also pay someone to do these tasks as well as the other formatting things that need to be done.

Your book also needs a cover. If it was published by a printer, they would assign someone to make a cover. I had to do my own. Do note the lovely model on the cover. The cover has to be within certain dimensions.

Oh — there are also things that you have to include or include in a certain way, like the Smashwords Edition part, publication details, etc. That whole page must be included and follow certain rules. If the book is accepted into the Smashwords catalog, then I go to another section of the site and get the book assigned an ISBN number.

Next, you try to upload the book. Try is the key word.

I submitted it at 4:30 PM and it finished uploading the next day, when I was at work. When I arrived home, there was only one flaw — the cover wasn’t the right height. I thought it was, and I had to work at least an hour to get it to stay the dimensions that I kept telling it to adjust to. That was it. The book was accepted for immediate publication, which means my formatting was correct for Smashwords. Next I submitted it for their review.

What happens if it’s accepted once they review it is that it goes out in their catalog. They regularly send out a catalog to places like Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Apple, etc. Those places then decide (or not) that they will also offer your book for sale in their e-book market, for a cut (of course).

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Smashwords pays quarterly as long as you’ve earned $25 in that quarter. You can also earn a commission by providing links to other people’s books. If someone follows the referral link and buys that book within 48 hours, you get a commission. This only works if you sign up for it, which also means that you’re agreeing that someone who does the same for your book gets a commission. Word of mouth, so to speak, seems like a great way for writers to support each other.

Smashwords also lets you set the price of the book (but Apple will only take books that have a price ending in .99). I set mine to what seemed to be the fairly standard price of $4.99, of which I get 3-something. You also get to set what amount of your book is free, which tends to be like 20%. That means you can read the first bit of the book for free, and if you like it, you buy it and read the rest.

It can happen that a popular e-book gets picked up by a publisher and becomes a print book as well. Had I gone the hard copy route first, it would have been like this:

Send a query (letter) to an agent. After a number of queries and rejections, find an agent. Then get the book to the agent, who hasn’t read a word of it yet. And then they try to find a publisher. It is basically a full-time job, getting one’s book published in print, which may or may not result in success and payment.

Another thing I like about e-books is this: If you get the book at Smashwords, you get it in every format for the one fee. You can download it in one format for your Kindle or Sony E-Reader or Nook, plus download it in another to read on your computer, or read it as a web page on your computer, or download it to your phone and read it there. In the world of e-books, both the buyer and the seller control the flexible process. The seller sets the price or can participate in coupons, for example, and the buyer determines the formats that match his or her needs. In the world of print publishing, the publishing houses control the whole thing.

Now you can go get more popcorn. And buy my book. Or Trish’s.