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.