I have my personal blog going again at danahuff.net. I am in the process of restoring my Harry Potter and genealogy blogs. Once I do, I’ll link those, too. It’s been a lot of work, but I think I’m on the right track. Because I had migrated to Word Press from Movable Type on the personal blog early in January, I was able to rescue most of the posts on that blog. I had exported the file. However, I had never done so for any of the other blogs, including this one, so I fear those entries are gone. I am going to try to rescue some of them from various web caches, but I learned a lesson. Back it up. You just never know what will happen, and I can’t think about losing all that writing too much or makes me sick.
All posts by Dana Huff
Romanticism Webquest
Romanticism: A Movement Across the Arts has been completely restored. I have uploaded some of the instructional Power Point presentations, but a few of them are on my computer at work, and I’ll need to get those uploaded from work. I have also uploaded many of the handouts I use, but not in pdf form yet. Again, those are on my computer at work.
I do not yet have my ideas or lesson plans pages ready. I’m working on restoring those pages.
For readers of my personal blog, my genealogy blog, and my Harry Potter site, please be aware that I am moving those sites to a separate domain. I’m still waiting for that domain to be connected to the servers, but I will announce here when things are ready.
Update Three
The Great Gatsby Treasure Hunt’s radio blog seems to be up and running again. I will try to get the radio blog for the Romanticism: A Movement Across the Arts activity up this weekend.
Update Two
I’m afraid I haven’t had time to try to work with the Radio Blog files on the Gatsby and Romanticism pages yet, but the Radio Blog on the Hurston page appears to be up and running. Let me know if you have trouble with it.
I’m not sure, but I think the blogs that appeared on this site are gone for good. It makes me very sad, as it represented about two and half years of writing, but I don’t know what to do about it. I’m complained about my host to the Better Business Bureau.
In case you’re wondering, essentially what happened is that my host was bought by another company. My site was taken offline and replaced by a placeholder page. However, the fact that this transition was about to occur was not related to my former host’s customers. In fact, they have always been very bad about communication when they will be making updates that will cause downtime. Anyway, this was one time too many, and I lost confidence in their abiliy, so I switched to Bluehost, and I’m very happy so far.
It is probably going to take a significant amount of time to restore some of this site, but I should explain some of the changes I intend to make.
- My education blog will now appear here, at this URL — https://www.huffenglish.com/. It was formerly at https://www.huffenglish.com/blog/.
- My classroom site will appear at its own own subdomain: http://class.huffenglish.com/. It was formerly at https://www.huffenglish.com/class/. This is not live yet, but I’ll update when it is.
- My personal non-education related sites, including my personal blog, my genealogy blog, and my Harry Potter blog will all appear at their own domain as soon as it’s online. I will unveil that when it’s active.
- The classroom wiki and lesson plan wiki were hosted offsite and are unaffected by my hosting problems.
In case you missed it, I wanted to take this opportunity to announce that my piece “Toward ‘Moral Perfection’: Integrating Judaic Concepts and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography” will be published in July 2006 in English Journal. This issue’s theme concerns teaching practices in private, parochial, and independent schools. Look for it!
HuffEnglish.com on Repair
Much apologies to my visitors as I try to repair the damage done when my old host, Maxipoint, Ltd., decided to take down my site without telling me first and went days without explanation, by which time I tired of their shoddy business practices and non-existent support and moved in at Bluehost.
It will take some time to get this site back in the shape it was in. Unfortunately, I believe most of my blog entries are lost forever. My former host is either unwilling or does not know how to give me access to my files.
So far, I have managed to restore
- The Great Gatsby
- The Great Gatsby Treasure Hunt
- Witch Hunt: A Web Scavenger Hunt for The Crucible
- Romanticism: A Movement Across the Arts
- Their Eyes Were Watching God: Zora Neale Hurston and the Folklore Tradition
Please note that the music files in the Radio Blogs on The Great Gatsby Treasure Hunt, Romanticism, and Zora Neale Hurston are not yet functional. I will be working on restoring these this evening and will update when I have.
Please bear with me as I rebuild this site.
Update: I am unable to get the Radio Blog files to work, and I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. I will keep at it and let you know what happens.
Wikis for Book Discussion
I am showing my students Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, which I highly recommend.
However, I noticed that due to a strange confluence of events (or possibly lack of thorough planning), we wound up finishing novels in two classes right in the middle of viewing the film. I was scratching my head, wondering what to do about that when I remembered I have a website.
I asked the students to discuss the novels on the class wiki I set up.
If you want to peek in on the discussion, here are the links:
- The Awakening, Kate Chopin, 10th grade Honors American Literature and Composition
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 10th grade College Prep Literature and Composition
I think they’re still trying to figure out this technology. It comes more naturally to some of them than it does others.
In other news, my article describing a project that integrates a study of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography with Judaic concepts will be published in English Journal this coming July. I’m very excited; I just received the acceptance today.
Blogspot Blogs Down
Blogger blogs hosted at Blogspot.com have been down for hours. There has been no news from either Blogger or Google (who owns Blogger) about the outage. Rumors are starting to fly about a DNS attack. Blogger’s status page is inaccessible, but it looks like you can still login and even update. At any rate, the scroll of updated blogs seems to be moving — none of the blogs I tried to click on from the scroll is up. I don’t recommend posting or changing your template, as I imagine your posts will disappear into the ether. If you go to Google and type in the URL for the status page, you get this teaser:
Blogger Status. Friday, February 03, 2006. We are currently experiencing some problems with Blog*Spot. A percentage of blogs are completely inaccessible. …
The Google cache for the page is from January 26, so that’s no help.
Lots of educators host their blogs through Blogspot. Just thought some of you might be wondering what was going on. I’ll post updates if/as I get them.
Check out Bloggers Blog for more (I can’t help but think there needs to be an apostrophe in there…).
Update: Blogger’s status page is now visible and has this message:
Saturday, February 04, 2006Blogspot is again experiencing problems – we are investigating.
Posted by Eric at 16:04 PST
I have checked out a couple of Blogspot blogs, and they seem to be up (for now).
Second Update: The status page is now blank with just the word “ok” in the corner.
Final Update: Logged in this afternoon, and Blogger’s status page apologizes for the outages and explains that the problems were too widespread to keep users aprised of the issues. They assure users they are taking steps to prevent this in the future. At 8:00 P.M. PST most of Blogspot was restored, save one of their filers, so some blogs were still inaccessible and could not be updated. I did notice that two blogs I tried to read returned a 403 Forbidden error. By 11:00 P.M. PST the server had been restarted and all the blogs except for “some legacy users have domain associations between Blog*Spot and external domains” were again available. As of this last update, “these associations are not functional at this time.”
Connected
In terms of my website, I have had a most exciting week. It really opened my eyes to the possibilties for collaboration among teachers. I keep track of my site statistics, and I was so excited to see that two different school systems were accessing two of my online activities for students. One is a Romanticism project that I designed myself with the germ of an idea from an conference I went to about a year ago. The second is a Great Gatsby webquest that I almost complete lifted (with a few tweaks) from Valerie Arbizu. I am so excited to see 30 or 40 computers logged in at the same time, accessing these activities. That means to me that the teacher simply directed them to that URL. That means something I came up with was useful enough to another teacher that he/she simply assigned it.
I have also had the opportunity to feel helpful to a colleague in North Carolina. Waterfall and I talked on the phone last night about writing research papers. In fact, I need to e-mail her some documents I promised. I felt very excited about being useful. You may think that sounds silly, but sometimes, I think all teachers wonder if they’re being of any use to anybody.
This made me start thinking about the potential we have for sharing our expertise. We can seek out teachers in our own schools and we have the world opened to us through the WWW. It is a very exciting time to be teaching, I think. Suddenly the teachers’ lounge just got a whole lot bigger.
Research Papers
I haven’t posted much in a while; my students are working on research papers, which I find leaves me with not much time to stay on top of education issues. I do want to read the Newsweek article about how we are failing our boys and write about that.
All I have to say for right now is that if you are an English teacher and haven’t read Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves, you just have to do so.
A New Take: “A Wagner Matinée”
I was fortunate to have a colleague (a former English teacher, currently an instructor in Humanities and Judaics) observe the second time I taught “A Wagner Matinée” — this time to my Honors class, and she gave me some excellent ideas. I was a little disheartened by the feeling I had after I taught the piece to my college prep class that the lesson had fallen flat.
Barbara, my colleague, told me that the best bit of teaching advice she ever had was (and I’m paraphrasing, since I left my notes at school) when you teach, don’t tell students everything you know. Instead, figure out what they know, and meet them there.
I told my students things that she and I would find interesting about Wagner, but she pointed out the students probably don’t care about it. Her suggestion for this lesson was to have Wagner music playing as they entered the classroom. As the students took their seats, I would tell them to listen to the music for a minute. I might then ask if they recognized it. Instead of giving the students a whole lot of information about the composer, I could tell them today we are going to read a story about a woman who loves this music. I should ask them how many of them love music, how many of them listen to it every day? What would happen if they couldn’t have it? I could then explain that the woman in the story loses music because of a choice she makes, and she has the opportunity to listen to this music she loves once more.
We also discussed reading aloud, and I would love to get your thoughts on this, because she confirmed something that I truly believe, but not many people seem to agree with me about. I think reading aloud to students is wonderful. I loved being read to. I still do. When someone is good at it, it is a pure pleasure. I have been told I should read for books on tape by my students, so I guess that means I’m good at it. However, I have been told by other teachers that this practice is not good for students. My supervising teacher asked me, when I did this, exactly whose reading comprehension was I working on? So while in my heart of hearts, I love it, I am always loathe to do it when I am going to be observed. It feels like a secret, “dirty” practice I don’t want anyone to know I do — for shame, I read to my students! Anyway, she asked me about reading to students. She said the student I chose to read aloud did a very good job, but asking students to read aloud in this way is always very risky. Readers need to be very good or it will actually hurt the enjoyment for others. That’s exactly how I feel! I can still recall my favorite high school teacher reading passages to us from Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, and I loved it. I can recall Mrs. Elliott reading us The Boxcar Children and Superfudge and Mrs. Esquibel reading Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret. I loved being read to, and it broke my heart to be told by colleagues that reading to my students was harmful to them. Barbara telling me it was a good thing made me feel validated. This is an issue I have truly been struggling with for almost all of my teaching career — this feeling that I was going against something everyone else believed was correct because my gut told me to. What do you think of reading aloud to students?