Author: Harold

Quandry

I heard about this situation from some relatives and I need to share some thoughts.

Young boy A, fourth grader, lives next to relative B.  In school last week boy A’s class was talking about cities in geography and his teacher, C, tells the class that New York City is the biggest city in the United States.  Boy A raises his hand and says “Actually, that’s only by population.  By area it’s really Jacksonville Florida.”  To which teacher C responds “No, you’re wrong.  Sit down.” 
“But..”
“End of discussion.”

Now, as it turns out, he’s right as long as you’re talking about the contiguous 48.  And I can understand the teacher cutting him off as this kid can be a bit of a handful and a trouble-maker at times. 

So boy A goes home, looks up the facts online, prints out some pages proving him right, and brings it to school the next day.  When he shows his references to teacher C she takes the papers, rips them up, throws them in the trash, and tells him the subject is not up for discussion.

What the hell kind of learning environment is that?  Okay, so his behavior lost him the benefit of the doubt on day 1, but on day 2 when the kid comes back with evidence don’t rip up his work and continue to claim he’s wrong!

Current Mood: 😯shocked

Dystopian Sailing

Over the last few months I’ve slowly been working at a new LJ layout, trying to make it look like the old Dystopia site scheme.  I’m really close, I’ve only got a few little details to work out.

If you want to install this theme you can find the source code here for the stable version here: http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/layerbrowse.bml?id=14025644
The unstable testing version is also available: http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/layerbrowse.bml?id=13171221

And now for my to-do list:

  • Remove all references to midtitle.
  • Remove icon position option in entry
  • Remove text-wrap options in entries
  • Add metadata position option in entries (in header)
  • Tweak entry headers / Pretty much done, maybe adjust title font size
  • Restructure comment headers and layouts.
  • Fix “Read comments” link on Reply to entry page.
  • Try to get orange pipe separator between journal header links. / Complex series of ifs and if/andifs to remove pipe at end of line if not all options checked / Added Scrapbook manually, need to re-do
  • Change entry header on entry page / Fix time format on entry page entryHeader
  • Add next and previous links to linkbar on entry pages
  • Fix header to span entire page width when larger than browser window
  • alternate entryHeader colors on Recent, friends views
  • alternate commentHeader colors on entryPage views
  • Fix spacing between comments Good enough
  • Add options for no defined icon and custom icon for syndicated feeds
  • Try to fix weird spacing in entry headers. Sometimes the date/time and the linkbar are separated by a wide gap. The gap isn’t consistent, but is variable. (See: http://fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com/friends/groups)
  • Figure out better use for friend colors
  • When using friendcolors fix links in entryHeader to use specified foreground color / Finish usericon links for shared, community, and openID accounts. Didn’t have to worry about shared or openID, they won’t show up on the friends page. Location link can’t be colored, but only a problem if header location is chosen. Links inside the subject can’t be colored because they draw their color from the CSS – there’s no way to apply a color directly.
  • Fix comment linkbar to show edit button and not say “Edit”
  • Fix entryHeader on ReplyPage
  • EntryPage should always show HR and “Post a new comment” link even if there are no existing comments
  • Restructure comment headers/copy from entryHeader
  • Add div to top of RecentPage to separate first entry from pageHeader
  • Fix layout of subjectline in EntryHeader when tags are listed alongside
Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Don’t Stop Me Now
Current Location: New Zealand