Lesson Plans

So as we keep presenting our tasks/lesson plans, I can definitely see us all using these in the future and our students loving them.  Personally, if I were still in high school, I would definitely want to do the Wordle ice breaker and the Breathing Underwater music/CD thing.  Aside from my personal preferences, I think everyone thought of really great ideas and all would be fun to do in the classroom!

Blogger

Ok so just kidding, that wasn't my last blog.  And good thing because I just figured out how Blogger works!  Granted, I never took much time to understand this sight and came on to do my blogs and got off.  That paired with the fact that I suck at technology made my life so much more difficult this semester!  I never understood why I followed people but it is because their blogs pop up and it is soo much easier to follow them!  I know this is sad... but I am still pretty happy I discovered it :)

I think I heard rumors floating around that this was possibly our last blog.  As interesting as I thought these were and genuinely enjoyed reading other people's, thank goodness!  Aside from my friends making fun of me for having a blog, it was so hard to remember to do it every week!  I have the worst memory ever and am surprised that I did as many as I did.  Not to mention thinking of stuff to write about- I don't know how real bloggers do it!  So if this really is my last blog, it's been real.

The Bane of our Existence as English Majors

Thankfully I don't mind writing, which is essential to us being English majors.  As much as I sometimes enjoy it there is always the hitch of actually deciding on what to write.  The invention of papers always comes as the hardest part for me.  As long as I am not set on what I want to say, I will avoid writing the paper like the plague.  Sadly this has begun to happen as I have begun to stare at all of my final papers...they are all that stand between me and summer...

Junk

So I am attempting to pack for Easter and while doing this I am trying to think of what else I can take home now for the summer so moving out won't be such a pain.  While doing this, I found about ten binders for classes that I will most likely never look at again, let alone use.  These classes, while making me "well-rounded", have also pumped my head full of information that is not helping me at all in my English classes.  Even if I liked them at the time, I wish it was as easy as cleaning out a room when it came to the useless info in our heads.  I was a biology major before becoming English and the only purpose those science classes serve is for me to do my roommates homework...lucky them.

Quotes

I just wanted to say something about the excercise we did this week when we picked out quotes from the book and wrote our thoughts on each others papers.  I think this is great for those students who don't necessarily like talking in class but are still able to participate because they know what is going on.  Another application I thought of was for quotes in books or what the charachters meant by it...stuff like that.  T. O. went over it at the end and I thought this was important to give a unifying qualilty to the excercise.  I also thought it was a great switch-up compared to the same old discussions!

Good things come in small...emails?

In one of my recent emails to my favorite and most valued past English teachers I wrote...
Hi.
English=Death.
Of course I didn't mean it, but at the time I was in the middle of beginning a 15 page paper I have to do.  She replied...
Hi.
English=Rebirth.

Just some food for thought.

Ed Measures

I don't know how you guys feel about your Ed Measures classes but surprisingly, it is one of my favorites.  The teacher and our various assignments are really getting me excited about teaching and the endless possibilities to assess and excite our future students.  I know that my English classes will be eventually applicable, but as a sophomore this class makes me feel that I actually might make it to being a teacher and what my job will entail- using objectives and assessments that center around my students and the material that I already love.  As lame as this sounds, I am excited for our final project which is just making objectives, a text, and a grading rubric; it's like pretend teaching when we were kids!

Our New Project

Saying I was skeptical about this 20-shot short story is putting it mildly.  I always hated these type of projects in high school and if I had the choice, would never go down this  path.  When I was assigned to "The Yellow Wallpaper" any enthusiasm I had left quickly diminished.  Psychotic people scare me and I always expect them to kill everyone by the end of the story, which thankfully she doesn't do.  My opinion began to change as we did the storyboard and planned out exactly what we are going to do.  In the past, this was always skipped this step and I think that is what made me annoyed with these projects; they lacked any construction or goal.  I can only imagine the shooting will go twenty times smoother than past experiences because these details are already in place.  As we continue to work on it, I am actually getting excited to see the final product, and as far as I know I am not acting so I am a happy camper :)

So throughout the past couple of weeks in one of my classes, we have been focusing on American colonial period minority and female authors.  The more we focus and talk about it, I wonder if as English teachers we are required to overcompensate for past oppression in our teaching by focusing on female and minority writers even though our country was founded on a WASP society.  I believe their writing is definitely important in our teaching and in history but when is honoring their memory and writing turned into overcompensation?

Writing

For my further research paper, I focused on an article that dealt with teens and their writing both in and out of the classroom.  I thought it was interesting how many of them thought writing was essential to their success in the future.  I think this was so surprising because I constantly hear how many people dislike writing and obviously pay attention because I want my students to like it; if they like it, they are prone to put more effort in. At the end of the article there were suggestions from the students as to what would help them enjoy writing more.  Some of the suggestions were letting them pick their own prompts, giving them more freedom when reading, receiving more feedback, and allowing them to share their writing more publicly like on blogs or wikispaces with their classmates like we do.  Seeing their own opinions mixed with statistics from the study really helped me to see what they want and how to better help them, which is hopefully all of our goals.

Planet eBook

So since we are all English majors I think this website would be great for any of you that ever need it.  It is called Planet eBook and has tons of free classic novels to download.  All you have to do is pick the one that you want and download it for free- it's that easy!  So save yourself some money and time and check it out if you ever need to :)

Is College for Everyone?

Through graduating high school and coming to college this question of "is college for everyone?" has been on my mind.  I definitely think some kids made the right decision in not coming to college but even though some of them did choose a different path, did enough? While searching through podcasts, I found one from NPR entitled "Do Too Many Kids Go To College" and it was an interesting, but long, debate on this topic.  I thought their points were both great and I haven't come to my own conclusion but you guys should check it out.

The Beauty of Blogging

I think one really important point that Hicks wrote about in chapter 3 was that of the students feedback from both the teacher and peers.  He talked about how teachers have given up on one-on-one conferences which is completely understandable but still sad.  This is where wikispaces or blogs come into play to make the feedback faster but still personal.  I also think the peer review that he talks about is very important and that is also a large part of using blogs and other word processors.  I am starting to really like our blogs; they are a great resource and I love seeing what everyone is writing and thinking about.  For our future students, these resources, I think, would be great, giving them both confidence and great feedback for their writing.

Wordle

While I love Wordles and think they are really cool when analyzing large pieces of work and getting an idea for themes, this lesson confused me.  I think it is a good supplementary material but I don't see how it could really help when trying to revise a paper.  This project seemed to focus on the Wordle instead of the writing and the actual revision process.  I see how it can be used to analyze the unity of a piece but I don't know...I guess I'm just not seeing the larger picture of using a Wordle in context with papers.  I really liked Rachel's idea of using it in vocabulary lessons and having the students try to come up with the word from the definition  turned into a Wordle so let me know if you came up with any other ideas!

My History Class..zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

There is always that one class that you dread going to because you don't like the professor, the material is horrible, and you never do the homework.  This happens to be my current history class and hopefully last one.  My super awesome professor decided to be a doll and not require us to buy a textbook.  Great.  Unfortunately we had to buy 6 other books to randomly read throughout the semester and write papers on.  I would not mind this if we also didn't have at least 4 readings a week on D2L from an actual textbook or random excerpts and no they aren't single chapters, they come in at least groups of three and way too long to print off let alone absorb.  We have to answer questions on these in paper formats, aside from our book papers, rarely discuss anything in class, and have random reading quizzes...as if I don't have enough to do.  Cool World History.  Thanks for letting me rant but avoid eye contact with me on Tuesdays/Thursdays :)

I found this super awesome article comparing the covers of past Times magazines. It shows several magazines from different countries that all deal with extremely serious political issues and movements then it shows the pathetic and self-centered  American one.  The real issue is whether or not it reflects on the readers or the journalists which is a question Gershon raises and I thought was very thought provoking so I would love to hear your guys' ideas.  

No Child Left Behind

The other day i was reading this very interesting article about No Child Left Behind and where it went wrong.  In a perfect world I feel like we would be able to implement these new ideas.  The author, Adam Richardson, wishes to implement the four c's instead of the three r's that our education is currently immersed in.  These four c's are creativity, complexity, curiosity, and collaboration.  He does make good points about teaching our students, especially in our ever-changing economy and job market.  I know that No Child Left Behind is anything but perfect and it fails to have anyone's full support but these presented ideas, as wonderful as they sound, are unenforceable; at least from my point of view.  I think they are great ideas that teachers should definitely implement into their classroom but as far as replacing reading, writing, and arithmetic it seems to be a stretch.   He knows that it is not realistic to replace them but thinks that No Child Left Behind is destroying our society and creating an even greater divide between income and ethnicity.
Let me know if you agree or disagree or like me, are on the fence :)

Stumbling

One of the few technological tools I use when I'm bored is Stumble Upon.  This website allows you to pick your interests then when you sign in onto your account they search the internet to find things that align with your choices.  When you get through one suggestion they have for you, you just hit the stumble button and the next one pops up.  So you don't lose any of the sites you like there is an option to like them to reference them later.  Other things I don't use are linking it to facebook, commenting on it, or sharing it with fellow Stumblers.  I love wasting time on this and even if I get bored with the interests I picked I can always just switch them up.  Try it out sometime!

The Dreaded Night Class

I'm in American Lit on Tuesday nights in attempt to catch up from my previous biology life and it is slowly becoming of one of my least dreaded night classes to date.  This past week we discussed Native American Literature and the main reason for none of us really connecting to or understanding it is that it is meant to be performed.  This brought to mind the Shakespeare plays I had to read over the summer for my English classes in high school.  We would eventually go on trips as classes to see plays which made them much more enjoyable but made me think of how important it is to expose your students to all methods of literature.  My professor, in further exploring this topic of better experienced than read, pulled up an example of slam poetry which I had never experienced but was completely enthralled by.  If you want to check it out I put up the link and am fully convinced that Eric Darby is amazing!

The Beginning...

I was initially really intimidated by blogging especially with my lack of any experience when it comes to technology but I am starting to enjoy it and appreciate the easiness of it.  When we were talking in class today it also brought the idea to a 180 for me especially in terms of using it in the future.  For our potential students I see this as a great resource, especially in writing classes.  I know that some concerns were raised about the students and their accessibility to the internet outside of school but I find that computer lab time would not be that difficult and overall beneficial to the students.