History of this Website

It started with a book…

Beginning Teacher's Resource Handbook by Dr. Jane Bluestein

In the fall of 1982, I was finishing my first book, a 44-chapter survival manual (right) for the new teachers in the University of New Mexico’s Graduate Intern program, for which I was the coordinator. Hand-typed, the cover “art” created from rub-on letters and a graphic from an ancient Mad magazine, which eventually became my company’s first logo, the product was a little rough. (The handbook above is actually the second-generation version with a glossy, printed cover! The original came with a plain manilla card-stock cover. Seriously.)

I was working full-time at the University when I started this business, though by 1985, I was no longer even teaching classes there. In 1986, I was joined by my husband, Jerry Tereszkiewicz, who left the construction work (which had basically paid the bills and kept us fed while I was getting the business off the ground) to work with me full-time.

Meanwhile, I concentrated my time on my writing and building my speaking resume! Between traveling, writing, distributing not only my own books and resources, but also about 300 other resources from 50 other publishers—plus learning all the “business stuff” you don’t generally pick up when learning to become a teacher, the confusion and challenges I saw in my logo (above) seemed particularly appropriate.

old_logo Lots of movement and growth those first few years. Starting the business in a corner of the den and eventually taking over a second bedroom, we soon built a separate, semi-permanent 12′ x 24′ building and a storage shed in the back yard. By 1995, though, even that space was feeling a little tight! We moved to our current location in October 1995 and took over most of the downstairs and a large portion of the garage with the business. (Original logo at right.)1

1997: Finally… a website!

I was, at that time, beginning to do more international work, taking a whole lot of computer classes, and writing a new book every year or two. But our next big priority was getting online! I set up a site in 1997, and after hiring two different people who never bothered to follow through on building the thing as they had promised to do, I figured I may as well just do it myself.

A new ISP and web host, and a few intense lessons with GoLive (the web-development software I used to create my first site) and I was on my way.

Dr. Jane Bluestein's webssite 1997 The image on the left is a screen shot of my home page as I’m typing this (Sept. 2003). The design came from the people I had hired and it was certainly adequate, if a bit “corporate” looking (as some tech-savvy educators suggested.)

This site worked well, but by the beginning of 2002, I felt like it needed a bit of a makeover. A new logo, new colors, new layout and a few Web design features I hadn’t known about previously entered the picture.

Looking back on the old site, I’m grateful for the help I had to get started. It really worked and, to me, is still a very nice graphic design. So I guess I needed to include this page, and these graphics, to honor what was.

Update: Fall 2008

I’ve had a blog running on this site for 11 years now, and now have a new version of this site to present to the world. I updated this history five years ago, just as I was about to launch the second version of the site. It looked like the image below and was designed to eventually evolve into nine separate sections, one each for early childhood, elementary, middle school, high school and alternative, counselors and mental health professionals, school administrators and staff development coordinators, parents and caregivers, the media, and the general public. I also had links for special education professionals and beginning teachers.

Very ambitious intentions, indeed.

Second version of Dr. Bluestein's website, 2003 But once I started putting the sections together, with individual indexes for each, a couple of things happened.

First of all, I realized that almost all of the material I had was almost equally appropriate for anyone working in a school environment (including beginning teachers and special education teachers) and in most cases, for parents and other caregivers as well.

Second, almost everything I added fell into this category, being relevant for anyone working with kids of any age.

Third, and most serious, as I added links and other information to the page, I ended up with three separate navigation avenues, which made getting around the site confusing and difficult. (I had always prided myself on my site being simple, clear, and easy to navigate, and it got to the point where even I didn’t remember where certain things were or how to get to them!)

So, I started looking at ways to make improvements and as so often happens, I ended up in this “well, as long as I’m changing this…” loop and ended up with a total renovation!

I am following suggestions of someone whose opinion I value to move in this current direction, but keep in mind that the revision to the second version of the site followed suggestions that ended up not really serving me, so I suppose it remains to be seen what happens now.

Either way, there is one more thing that I had to consider before undertaking the overhaul of more than 600 pages: The second site was constructed using frames and a whole lot of tables which, as one young designer said, is so 2003!

Sheesh! So FINE!! I’ve learned some more CSS (cascading style sheets) to create a more current version of the site structure. Please don’t even bother to tell me how outdated it already is, OK? I’m keeping up as well as I can!

So the history of this site now takes us up to my being about a third of the way through its third rendition. Unlike the last overhaul, in which I waited until the site was done to launch the entire thing, I have already uploaded the finished pages, so what we have at this moment is a hodge-podge of old stuff and new.

The old color-coded frames (with the beautiful composite photos for each) are gone. Perhaps I’ll add screen shots of the pages to some future gallery, but their presence just complicated things and they really don’t fit anywhere in the current navigation scheme. And frankly, I don’t believe that many people were using them anyhow.

I’ve renamed a few things, and moved a few others, which will be a problem for anyone who has bookmarked these pages, but I’m hoping that people will head for my new home page and find their way from there.

In the meantime, there may well come a time for me to turn this site over to someone much more technically savvy than I, but for the moment, this is something I enjoy doing and hey—it’s FREE STUFF, lots of it, so please bear with me during the renovation and enjoy it for what it is, in any way this material may be helpful to you, your kids, your colleagues, your family, or your school.

Winter, early 2012 update

Third version of Dr. Bluestein's website, 2008 This is one of those pages I created and sort-of forgot. I came across it when I did the site over a few years ago and now that I’m thinking of tweaking the existing design, here I am again. (Since I didn’t bother to put up a picture of the last site revision, here it is on the left.)

So this is a good time to reflect on the growth and development of this company since my last entry here, because a lot of history has happened in the past three-plus years.

For one thing, Jerry officially retired. His work—primarily fulfilling book orders (which have slowed down considerably in the past few years) and maintaining inventory— had reduced enough that we didn’t even bother putting him on the books in 2010, so an official retirement just made sense. When things get busy and I need a hand, I recruit his talents, but now his status is “helpful spouse” rather than “business manager.”

I turned 60 last April and as many of my former colleagues had long since left their teaching positions, thoughts of retirement started dancing in my head, too. Funny, though, how quickly these ideas got crowded out by all kinds of new products and projects I suddenly wanted to do.

Much of this is detailed in my blogs, but to summarize some of the major changes that have occurred since the last update, much of which relates to the content and eventual design changes for this site:

Books: I did three more books for Corwin—four if you count The Win-Win Classroom, which I didn’t even mention above. (It came out in 2008.) In addition to a Facilitator’s Guide, I wrote a book for beginning teachers (and the people who work with them) called Becoming a Win-Win Teacher (re-released in 2021 as The Beginning Teacher’s Survival Guide) and more recently, edited a compilation of chapters from nine different books for Best of Corwin: Classroom Management project.

“Pads” on the Back Templates: As we started to run low on our stock of “Pads” on the Back, we decided to offer them as a downloadable template. I created the template in response to a request for a Spanish-language version and in the ensuing months, found people gracious enough to translate the template into their native language. (Well, I suppose that would not be exactly true for the Latin version, but you get my drift.)

eProducts: I started offering more and more of our other products as downloads. In addition to putting the contents of the TeacherTapes online as an mp3 download, you can now get The Book of Article Reprints as well as individual articles in PDF form. Look for more ePubs, maybe even in eReader formats as I figure (or farm) this process out, as well as audio and, eventually, video files to become available on this site.

Spectrum Podcasts: This project has taken over my life (not to mention the back room of my office). With support from my sponsors and friends at Energize Students, I have, to date, recorded six shows. I have another show scheduled to record this week and about a dozen other guests lined up (so far). I published two of the shows on this site just yesterday, and will have the third up before I go to bed tonight.

Newsletter: Another just-starting-now project. I finally got my mailing list sorted out and exported and am working to set up a regular monthly newsletter. I’m hoping to get the first one out by the beginning of March.

website v3.2: I am in the process of hiring a prospective Web designer. I’ve talked with her on the phone and she’s looked at my site and wants to work with me. It doesn’t sound like she’ll have any trouble fulfilling the wishes on my wish list and depending on what she proposes when we connect later this week, this may actually be website version 4.0 (although I’m honestly hoping to keep a lot of the features from this current incarnation). I will try to remember to post a screen shot of the new site whenever it launches, presumably soon.

So much for retirement. Ha!

Update: Summer 2012

site_sketch_2012 I’m back to doing the site and design myself. I wasn’t happy with anything the design person was turning in so I came up with the following on my own. It uses the colors from the current site at the time (see previous photo) in a completely new layout and design. I liked it and thought it had potential. But then a strange thing happened. It may have had to do with some of the things my design person started doing to this layout (not good things), but I realized that I was getting a little tired of these colors. I liked the design, but something wasn’t quite working for me.

And then I started having these dreams in deep teals and peacock blue and started playing around in Photoshop again. After many false starts and different combinations of variations in background, layout, and text, I came up with the following:

This is where I am right now, trying to figure out how to get my WordPress layout to look like this. As of early August, this design has undergone a few small changes as I discover things that are rather challenging to pull off in WordPress. I am currently in the process of building what will probably be a skeleton site, bare bones of what absolutely needs to be here before I can launch.

Details as they evolve…

Update: Summer 2014

Well, as you can see, I’ve made a good bit of progress on this site, and now have over 500 pages available. Many of these posts have new content, although most were converted from the old site. (I still have more than 300 pages and several sections to bring over, including all the posts in Spanish and French and all the Links sites).

I realize that this will take some time, as I’m still working on the site in between other projects. I’m sure I’ll be very happy to announce that ALL of the pages from the old site have been converted one day, and in the meantime, will continue posting new stuff here at least every few weeks.

The fact that there’s as much here as there is a bit of a story in itself. I switched my site design to WordPress, a Web-based “content management system” and blogging tool that uses different programming languages from what I had used on the previous sites, stuff I had studied but never really used, much less mastered.

I spent the entire summer of 2012 and a good part of the fall struggling with tasks that, to me, should have been much, much simpler. Example: You know the photo bar at the bottom of every page? (You can see it in the illustration I created in Photoshop above.)

Well, in an HTML site, I could plop that puppy right where it belonged with no problem at all. In WordPress, nothing I did, no code I wrote, would get that stupid footer to display properly. I spent weeks driving myself crazy and getting nowhere.

I finally realized that I needed to make a choice between developing content that would help people or learning code I would probably only need to use once and promptly forget again. This was not as easy a choice as it may seem as I love learning new computer stuff. But I finally decided to surrender the under-the-hood work to someone who already knows it so I can get back to what I do best.

I’m embarrassed at how long it took me to get to that point, but once I connected with Tom Todd, my WordPress Guy (and, at this point, good friend), he got the footer where it belonged (probably in about 10 minutes) and I was free to get on with my life.

Note: I had a fairly extensive list of other projects and events going on in my life, which are described in greater detail in various blogs, including Highlights and Milestones, and an article I’ve been updating every few years, “What’s a Purchase Order? Confessions of an Accidental C.E.O.” I have deleted them to keep the focus o the history and evolution of this website instead.

Update, early 2019

Lots of changes as I move into Stage Next, which I’ve been referring to as “Randomly Retired; Selectively Speaking.”

Instructional Support Services, Inc. has reverted to a sole proprietorship (LLC) and many aspects of the business will be coming out under one of the subsidiaries of Father Sky Industries. I made the difficult decision to close the store and get rid of our inventory (which took until the end of 2021 to finally clear out).

As far as the site goes, I thought all was well until my friend and site-design guy, Tom Todd, delivered the news that the site wasn’t working on iOS devices. Sigh.

If I’m going to all this trouble to make this material to people who want it (and can find it), it won’t do much good if I don’t keep up with the devices people are increasingly using to search for content. So by this point, I was delliberately slowing things down, concentrating my efforts on this latest (fifth version) of this now-22-year-old website.

I am going through the 500+ pages currently on this site and still importing posts from 2 site versions ago. This is tedious work, but it should make the site a bit easier to navigate, and will certainly bring the protocols up to date (at least as they stand right now)!

Further updates are included in my (more or less annual) blog pages as well as in the timeline of highlights and milestones in my life and career.

Update, late April 2022

I have found many of these details in different places on this site, but it bears mentioning again that the combination of decreased funds to schools, fewer speaking engagements, and most of my books being taken out of print by newly downsized publishers has brought my career cycle closer to the end of its run. However…

Since the last update:

I have given away or donated remaining inventory, cleared out that section of the garage, and eliminated what had served as our “warehouse.”
I had my last in-person speaking engagement in November 2019. The little bit of work looming for 2020 was shut down by Covid. I don’t miss the demands of travel (for work), but I confess that every now and then, I miss working
I’ve shifted priorities to helping out my mom (who turns 98 in July) after she went through a breakthrough case of Covid, hip replacement surgery, and a pelvic fracture at the end of last year. (Pretty much let everything else go between September and the end of March, when I went to visit her.)
I brought out two books in the “reprint series,” including a 25th anniversary edition of The Parents Little Book of Lists and The Beginning Teacher’s Survival Guide (formerly Becoming a Win-Win Teacher). A reprint of The Perfection Deception is currently in the works.
I have been dragging my feet about announcing my retirement because I’m still not sure exactly how retired I am. That said…

I’ve decided to renew my web hosting through 2025. I will continue to add new material for parents, teachers, and the general public; update availability of books and other resources; and scale down the biographical info and speaking topics.

Photos

To break up large blocks of text, I originally included a large number of photos. Many of the photos still on this site are ones I’ve taken myself, although there are a few for which I’ve asked for a source. A few others were sent to me in emails or social media, with a handful that will cite their source from other websites.

Years ago, I subscribed to photo services that offered graphics and photos for use in projects like these. I no longer have any paperwork that goes back that far so I’m being cautious and limiting photos I can’t prove I purchased any more. To avoid copyright issues, I have removed most of the photos on this site.

Seeing as the main purpose of the site is to provide as much content as possible, I will have to trust the intelligence of my site visitors to tolerate some pretty text-heavy pages. For some visual relief, I am adding “pull quotes” wherever I can to break up the text.

As I go through this site and update these pages, you may come across missing photos. Please notify me when this happens (please note which page). Likewise if you recognize a photos for which I am seeking a source.