Busy with Curriculum Work
May 2nd, 2007 by MarkThings have been busy again. I’ve been helping Poagao migrate his site to Wordpress. It’s been much more difficult helping him migrate than anybody else I’ve helped. Since Google updated Blogger, all the old migration tools are broken. The fact that Poagao’s Journal is six years old, is a Byzantine mix of modern CSS and bronze-age table-based design, and has well over a thousand entries doesn’t help either. My curriculum work is really what’s been keeping me so busy, though.
Writing new lessons has been getting more and more difficult. On one hand, I really want to get my students up the the level where they can start reading some extensive readers as quickly as possible. On the other hand, only one publisher has been willing to share their vocabulary lists with me. Even with that list, it’s getting harder and harder to introduce remaining vocabulary from the list in such a way that it fits into some or another topic. Now, each lesson is a balancing act.
My students have also started a new homework cycle. That means another written test, a translation homework and two more translation tests. Since I’ve gotten a bit behind with my recording, I’ve had to start burning CDs that are incomplete. Once the rest of the lessons for my current CD are done, I’ll have to burn complete versions.
On the good side, my students and parents still seem pretty happy with everything. Obviously, a few of the lazier students would rather be video gaming, but recently, I saw a good sign. There was a Saturday class that couldn’t meet because of a make up class they had at school. I told them we’d have to cancel the class, and the students actually asked the secretary if it could be re-scheduled for Saturday evening.
I have the overall plan in my head, I just have to write it, record it, and stay ahead of my students…
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May 3rd, 2007 at 1:14 pm
I am not expert in CSS but is it that bad that his design was table-based. Don’t you find it kind of futile that perpetual race with technology forces people to keep migrating from one platform to another, or to keep rewriting software from one OS/language to another without much gain?
May 3rd, 2007 at 5:05 pm
I did the same thing from Blogger to WP to hosted WP.
It’s a pain, but it’s normally worth the effort. There is so much more than you can do with WP.
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Vitaly, CSS has huge advantages over table-based designs. For one thing, tables make your pages a lot larger. More importantly, though, is that CSS lets you separate content from presentation.
Recently, I decided to change the color that links on my site turn when the mouse is hovering over them. All I had to do to change that, was add one line in my style-sheet, and all color of all hover links on the 200 pages of this site changed. If I hadn’t been using CSS, I would have had to go through and manually change the all the links. It would have been a nightmare.