Saturday, April 11, 2015

April 10, 2015

Today one of the paras stopped me in the hall and looked slightly concerned/confused when she asked if I was coming back next year. I told her that I was because I still have a year of school left. She seemed a bit relieved and said that she had heard a couple people talking about how they were going to miss me when I was gone. At first that sounded nice but then my next thought was that was a little premature and perhaps they had nefarious things in mind. So I asked the para if they had plans to kill me and if the para had just spoiled it for me. She told me to pretend I hadn't heard anything.

There was more testing today. No surprise there. They were also boring, as they have been this year. Which I guess is a nice change after all the crap that happened last year.

Near the very end of the last test this afternoon, while waiting on three slower test takers to finish, I had a breakthrough idea for my project that is due on Sunday. I think last night I decided on the standard, performance indicator, and outcome I wanted to focus on. That outcome says that the information literate student recognizes prejudice, deception, or manipulation. My idea this afternoon was to make three signs, similar to “Beware of” / “Found” / “Missing” / “Wanted” posters, one for prejudice, one for deception, and one for manipulation, and include famous examples on them. I originally thought about tracking down a famous example from scholarly publications where a researcher had exhibited one of those traits. And I probably could have done that if I had more time but I don't feel like I do.

Today most of the teachers and staff wore shirts what were meant to show our support for all the kids taking tests. After school the principal had us all meet out in front of the school so we could take a picture. I imagine it looked a bit strange, all these adults wearing the same shirt, blocking the front door of the school.

Tonight, while looking for ideas for a layout based on my original idea I had the thought of a warning label. I searched a few different things and came across a Caution sign, which narrowed down my focus. I created Caution signs in Publisher that say “Manipulative Content”, “Prejudiced Content”, and “Deceptive Content”. I then spent most of my night trying to come up with an example image to put on each sign. I started with an image of Pinocchio for the Deceptive sign. Later I decided that really wasn't the best example and had another brilliant flash of genius and switched it to a picture of the Trojan Horse, one of the greatest deceits in history. For the Manipulative sign, I used a picture of Hannibal Lecter. I'm still trying to come up with something for the Prejudice sign. It still remains illusive but I think I'm getting closer. Hopefully something will come to me tomorrow. I also need to come up with what I want to write on each sign. I haven't decided if it will just be a description of each or quotes or examples or what. Then I need to write the one page paper about information literacy. Plenty of time.


Now I'm going to go to bed. It's one o'clock and my mom wants to move more stuff out of the old house in the morning. There is apparently still stuff in the shed. Can't wait for that. And then I'll get to go back to working on my project. I'm feeling a lot better about it now that I have a solid idea. And as soon as I finish it I need to go back to my group project, which my partner is still absent from. And I need to look into the research paper, which I haven't given a single thought.

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