Closing Statements

While looking at the paper that was provided for us before the final exam, I had a lot of time to reflect on what this class actually meant to me. I had learned a lot from the text and other students in this course and it was very inspiring.

Looking back at it, I would have to say that You Gotta Be the Book and Clearing the Way were my two favorite, and most inspirational texts from this semester. I had learned quite a bit on how to approach grading papers written in class, all the way to interpreting texts and how to come to a conclusion as a class. With these ideas all in my head I was able to implement them now, as a teaching assistant, and hopefully later on as a teacher of English. This course had created a very beneficial basis on which I can build my future off of.

I think one of the coolest things I have taken from this course is ideas and solutions to certain issues we may experience in the classroom. As a class, we were able to discuss alternative possibilities and solutions and I feel everyone had amazing input and I would be able to put all of this to use later on. On top of class involvement, there were also other texts, like Reading, Writing, and Rising Up, that provided us with future lesson plans. I don't know about the other students, but I definitely plan on keeping this book around for my future teaching exercises.

All in all, this class has brought me nothing but important and beneficial lessons for my future classroom and I look forward to implementing them. It was a pleasure to be in this class, especially with the few people we had. I felt it was efficient, helpful, and very productive. I hope to have more classes like this in the future.

What I Notice Now

While sitting in class today it was great to see what lessons the class has come with so far. It is fun to be able to build a presentation for everyone and teach about something we are passionate abut as future teachers. With that in mind, I thought it was interesting how we were all able to build off of each other in a way.

I saw today that many of us had some of the same ideas as to how we could incorporate all of these with a lesson plan in the future. It seemed as if Linda Christensen's Reading, Writing, and Rising Up was a good book to refer to when it came to lessons. This book, in my eyes, is one that we should try to keep around for our futures. But why is this book so popular for teachers and why is it so effective? It seemed to me that a few of us referred to Where I'm From today and I'd love to expand on that.

I looked into a book called Cultural Competence: A Primer for Educators, by Jean Moule. In this text, Jean refers to the "where I'm from" piece and expands on why it would be beneficial in a classroom setting. "The idea behind this activity is to use two themes: Our Foundations and The Journey" (149). In this she is saying the foundations make us consider things like beginnings, family and friends, community, values and other things. On the other side of the spectrum, we have the journey. The journey is you being prompted by words, identity development, pain and healing, joy, dilemmas, and a lot more that the individual has experienced.  There is more on this at this Link.

I feel like, to many teaching professionals, Linda Christensen provides us an awakening experience with this project. She isn't only laying out lesson plans for future teachers. She is teaching us how to teach with joy and serve justice while doing so. With this book and hand, we are able to teach in a way not many others are provided a chance at. She provides great guidance for us all.

Teacher as A Researcher

As a teacher, we will constantly have to be the one to evaluate and grade our students. In some subjects it is very easy to grade, like math for instance, but in english it can be a tad bit more difficult. According to You Gotta Be the Book by Jeffrey Wilhelm, teachers serve a role as a researcher in the classroom. "They are continually evaluating, interpreting, and making decisions- or they wouldn't survive two minutes in the classroom" (196).  In this, Wilhelm makes it a point to show how necessary it is for teachers to follow their "researcher" role. Without doing so, we basically fail as teachers.

In sum, he is saying that as a teacher we have to be so observant and it is critical for the students. We have to provide appropriate criteria and observe these students progress through class work and discussion. In many cases, this could be a hard task to accomplish due to spark notes, and  also you could give credit to someone who doesn't deserve it. We constantly decipher those who are preforming at a regular pace and actively involved in the class itself. We kind of become experienced as the ones who assign the text and in that, we are the ones to gather the right answers and information and make sure the students match theirs to ours.

Another way to look at all of this is when Wilhelm says, "Teacher research has helped me reimagine my role as that of a democratic worker: reading and learning with my students in collaborative fashion; helping to establish a community where we listen to, value and learn from each other; and establishing democratic values and processes as we read and learn and work toward better was of being, understanding, and acting both as individuals and as a community" (196). I think Wilhelm has one of the most appropriate views as a teacher, and it is one we should all adapt.

With the perspective of being a researcher, we are able to see educating as a whole new process, which isn't taught by right and wrong answer. We approach teaching by a community action, we come to a consensus of a solution and work along together to determine what the text (or assignment) means. I believe this approach would be very beneficial to the teaching population. I would provide a link but if you simply google "teacher researcher" on google books, the results are amazing and endless!

Reading Creates a New World

After reading a part of chapter three in You Gotta be The Book, by Jeffrey Wilhelm, I came across a section about relating to characters and the story itself. It made actually rethink of some cases where books had actually made me cry and I read stories thinking as if I was the lead character. In the world now, most students don't get to experience this as often as they should. With technology being a major role in every day lives, in and out of school, I feel as if the students are deprived of this experience. The recent upcoming of technology everywhere has put serious withdrawals on the creative mind and the love of literature has decreased drastically. Because why read a book when there is Facebook, right?

Wilhelm shares accounts where his students have wrote about how they related to a story and it had brought back so many great feelings that literature has brought me throughout the years. On page 80, we read of a girl named Cora and how reading The Wreck of the Hesperus had effected her. She says while reading she wished she would be able to just follow the characters around, but instead, she imagines herself as those characters. I think this makes a very literal interpretation of "You Gotta Be the Book". Once you begin reading, you get so caught up in the text that it almost consumes you and you become whoever you are reading about and live the very same situation through them.

Not many people think this way, and maybe some have never personally experienced it, but I believe if you were to read a book this would be the way to do it. Text allows the mind to travel in so many different directions, and this is a quality that technology deprives us of. Yes, there are some thought provoking technological instruments, and some made for that very purpose, but I think many of you can agree that it isn't the same. Your eyes follow the words and the minds grasps the story so perfectly in unison that you can't seem to veer away.

Here is a fun link of how reading can benefit our lives! Enjoy!
http://www.buzzfeed.com/erinlarosa/12-scientific-ways-reading-can-actually-improve-your-life#.euWyKLPOD

You Gotta Be the Book

While reading Chapter 2 of You Gotta Be the Book, I had found the point of valid reading very interesting. We had discussed in class how, while moving through the education system, we have to make a transition from not interpreting text in many ways to having to find a hundred ways to interpret text. In many cases, there are more ways than one to decipher what an author is trying to say in his stories. Taking Shakespeare for example, he has wrote so many sonnets and plays, each with his own meaning. While we try to read these pieces, we are forced to come up with our own take on what is happening. I could say that the situation is about A, then someone else could claim it was about B. Regardless, we can never truly find out the answer due to the fact that Shakespeare is no longer around.

While reading things in class, there is always conflict on trying to achieve the right answers while reviewing text. But that is just it. What is the right answer? How can a teacher tell you what is right or wrong if there are multiple interpretations. I tried to gain some outside sources to clear the confusion but I could find none. All I could find is how to interpret something like data, something with a fixed standard or outcome. Seeing this information only proves my point even more though! How can we interpret incorrectly if there is no set, correct way?

Using Wilhelm's reference to Rosenblatt, "It is critical to consider the author's intent and meaning, embodied in the "actual accomplishment" (40). Looking at this quote it is easy to see that we are supposed to pull meaning and ideas from the text we read, but I feel as if we are given the right to decide what those are on our own. There should be no way to determine if your right or wrong, unless you ask the author themselves, in which case the teacher is unable to grade accordingly. There is no set system for the validity of reading and interpreting text.

Building A Class Lesson

Before Spring Break, we were asked as a class to bring in a book and prepare a potential lesson plan to follow the book of our choice. At first, I had no idea how to approach the assignment so I had set it aside, but eventually, it started to click. 

After reading Romano's book, I learned a few set skills on how to grade papers as a teacher of english as well as ways to approach lesson plans. I was still briefly confused because, as a teacher, this lesson plan will be affecting many people's grades.It was hard for me to come up with something off the bat until I realized I would be doing this for the rest of my life. Then I thought, I should do it based on something fun and exciting. My theory is that with each lesson plan you build, depending on subject matter, the students should have some choice or say in it as well. 

Thinking about it in that perspective, I also brushed upon what I found fun about reading the material. With association of my prior knowledge, the lesson plan began to come with ease. I found some of Romano's words encouraging to help get through the stressful parts and I began to be able to find a lot of fun in making plans. As a future teacher myself, this makes me beyond ecstatic to start. I feel as if this assignment had prepared me for reality of what it is kind of like to be in the class. 

While reading text for my courses, I continuously find myself thinking about how this could be made into a lesson. I want to make an impact on the students, and how could I or would I do that with the text at hand. I found that in almost anything you read you can pull out a theme, or even something to learn. Reading opens up the mind and allows us to learn through someone else's experiences. This isn't something you can achieve on a normal basis, and this assignment helped me realize how important it is to pull these ideas out of text. I look forward to the next.

Here is a link on interpreting text and the authors purpose of writing!

http://www.criticalreading.com/interpretation.htm

Clearing the Way

While reading the Grading portion, in chapter 8 of Clearing the Way, I found that Romano's approach is by far the most fair approach I've seen. According to Romano, the first thing the students look at upon receiving their papers is their letter grade, then his comments. He gives a grade and comment in a way that the students will want to keep writing. He doesn't look at the grammatical correctness of it, nor the length (at first draft at least), he looks at the story the student has to tell and how well they do that.

While reading papers, Romano says " I'm looking for surprises of language and vision. I'm looking for vivid images. I'm looking for rhythms of language and voice. I'm looking for an adept employment of some naturally evolved form that might even prompt me to utter aloud my appreciation as I sit alone reading" (114). In this, I feel that it is the most fair approach to grading writing assignments. Let's take creative writing for example. While grading a personal story there isn't much you can grade on. I have always wondered how teachers determine they would grade something that someone wrote off their memory.

In Romano's perspective, it isn't the grade that matters. It's the story. he is striving for his students to become better writers and he does so by giving them a chance. He understands there will be error, but the point is that the story is being told in such a way that you want to keep on reading. In some cases the grading scale would have to be implemented. There are certain criteria that some papers require, and if the criteria is not met, then that student deserves a lesser grade regardless of how eel the story is told.

All in all, I feel Romano's approaches and ideas are some that I believe and share along with him. It is hard as an English teacher to implement an actual grading scale. But with Romano's approach, we are able to see alternative means to the grading system. There is a need to still have one to be able to determine how kids are doing in class, but not as harsh or strict as a math class scale would be. This is why I think Romano has the right idea, he understands that.

Tips on how to "grade" creative writing.
http://jasonrenshaw.typepad.com/jason_renshaws_web_log/2010/04/how-do-we-grade-creative-writing.html

Reading, Writing, and Rising Up

In class today we had the chance to try out one of the exercises in Linda Christensen's book. We had wrote poems, of a sort, of where we are from and had the chance to share them in class while commenting on other people's poems. At first, it was kind of nerve wrecking to have to share something that I had kind of made personal. I thought, as any normal person would, that there would be laughing or that awkward silence. Normally, I am the first to volunteer in many aspects, but this and other personal work gets me flustered.

After having heard Lindsay read her poem first it really cleared the air. The more I listened the easier it was to relax, hence me volunteering second. I honestly probably turned red while sharing my poem but after, I was glad I read it. I believe this exercise is hard at first, but as the time goes on and we do it more, it could actually be very fun.

In my future class, I hope to approach pieces the students write in this same manner. Linda provided such a great layout for accepting classroom activities and I found it very beneficial myself. I think that reading the book Reading, Writing, and Rising Up was very helpful for an understanding of how a classroom works. But not only does it do that, it'll also help us in the future with in-class work and activities to attempt. This book is definitely one worth keeping around if you are looking at becoming a teacher of english! Inviting kids into the classroom environment is the first step to that teacher-student bond.




(A link telling more about the invitation into the classroom)
http://www.csun.edu/~krowlands/Content/Academic_Resources/Diversity_Multiple%20Intelligences/Diversity/Christensen-Where%20I'm%20From.htm

Writing Brings Out the Real You

After the class session today, and discussing the matters in Reading, Writing, and Rising Up, I found that there are many different approaches to getting a student to open up in class. Typically, in a high school setting, you don't get much cooperation out of the student population. Teachers are not necessarily the heroes anymore, they are just the ones who force work onto the students in their eyes. So how does one really get participation in classes? Especially when it comes to writing in class.

From my perspective and personal experience, I found it relatively helpful to vent by writing. Our teacher didn't made it an assignment, he made it kind of like an adventure. We would get an idea or question to think about and that would be the topic of discussion in our in class notebooks. He allowed us 15 minutes at the beginning of every class to sit and think, then write. In this exercise, I never even saw it as writing to our teacher, even though we knew he would read it, it was writing to the notebook. These notebooks never left the class by any means, no one but our teacher read from it, and no in the class knew what in our journals (unless we decided to share).

I believe, as an upcoming teacher, I would take the same approach as my teacher did. I would be happy knowing that the students would take part in the assignment and I could watch their progress grow throughout the school year. I would put any matter up on the board, like "I am from..." and other things we have read from Reading, Writing, and Rising Up. I think the book itself also provides great ideas on material to discuss as well as in class assignments. I definitely plan on keeping this book around for when I become a teacher of english.

Life in The Classroom

For my blog post for this week I thought I would mix it up a bit and talk about the difference in classroom activity from Elementary, High School, and College. Recently, I have been working at an elementary school on Monday mornings, and I just observed a whole day in a high school class Friday. I found, like many other people, that maturity and willingness to learn definitely comes with age. In my elementary class it is pure chaos, nothing gets done, the kids always talk, etc., to me I found a freshman high school class works very similarly.

I found that I, in the elementary, am constantly trying to gain order and attention in the work day. In the case of freshman, the teacher acted very alike. The kids were screaming, not doing work, throwing things and so on. The teacher had to yell at the students, pull them aside, and even stop class to regain order. These kids wanted nothing to do with the course. As the day went on I witnessed a 12th grade class as well. These kids just sat quietly, all of them calm and respectful, and got all of the work done.

We all know how class goes once college rolls around. We pay a lot for an education so all tasks are done to demand, everything is orderly for the most part, and there is little to no distractions in a class. Most people in classes here are also living throughout the struggle of financing the classes and so we get the most out of what we pay for.

As I began running all of this information through my mind, I thought it would be a cool little timeline to share with you all. It is kind of fun to sit in on all these classes and see how the students change with time and how it effects the classroom environment. The more time that passes, the more respect we as teachers gain. I look forward to see what more time allows me to see in the class.

Huck Finn In Classrooms

After reading Why I Wouldn't Teach Huck Finn Anymore: Course Design as a Sociopolitical Act, I don't think I could do anything more than agree with Ms. Shoaf. I don't understand why a curriculum with a book like Huckleberry Finn should still be taught in schools. If exposure to racism and things of that sort is what you strive for, then take them for a field trip anywhere in America. We are living this every day, if you yourself aren't experiencing it, then you're watching it happen.

I feel that if racism and so many other types of discrimination and segregation take place now, a curriculum shouldn't be based on the stories of perception of the situation. It is something everyone lives now and it isn't needed to be taught by books like Huckleberry Finn, it can be learned first hand by the student. So why is it still taught today? Why do we still find this book a necessary means of education? Some people purely teach it because of familiarity, others because they still strongly believe it worth learning. In this article I read, http://www.tolerance.org/article/teaching-huck-finn-without-regret , the person finds it fully reasonable to teach in the perspective of realism. I don’t think many people consider actions that happen today instead of stories someone made a hundred forty years ago.

If anything, I believe we should be exposing our students to a curriculum with text depicting slavery, racism, and segregation through the eyes of where it all started. It is my strong belief that we need to enlighten kids from this day and age with past events that happened in other countries, as well as our own. Not saying they are more important, but it is definitely a necessary curriculum. It is real, and with more knowledge passed on about it, the more aware and likely we are to end it today.

Expanding Literacy

While reading our Early Career English Teachers in Action book, I found the discussion of expanding literacy very interesting. To me, literacy is something you have to want to expand upon yourself. If an education system attempts to force new literacy's on you, you will be more and more with drawn from the new material.

To me, the best way to expand literacy is to do so as inconspicuously as possible. For some cases, the literacy can be language barriers between home in school. In which case, you need to sit with the student with these barriers and help them understand more thoroughly. But, in the case of education, you should try to expand with high interest yourself. Literacy isn't something that comes with ease, as a teacher you have the duty to help the students inch their way toward understanding. For example, in my high school we barely learned about anything besides U.S. history and literature. How nice would it have been if we could've expanded upon other countries and their backgrounds.

Not saying baby steps of exposure to more sources will always work, but it is definitely worth the shot. Also, with students who seem far from interested in the expansion may become more distraught and withdrawn. In this case, you need to be aware of the situation at hand. Work with the student and better the way you are teaching the material. Not everyone is going to be interested in the task at hand, so it is better to find a teaching technique to help them want to learn, or at least be engaged. All in all, chapter 6 provided a great outlook on how to handle these situations and on how to help the students better themselves in the classroom setting.

Teacher Identity

While reading Chapter 5 of Early Career English Teachers in Action, I found it kind of eye opening to see the standards that teachers are held to. I always knew that there was a high point of professionalism that needs to be held, but to the extent it is at I didn't expect.

In the text, it had talked about the expectations of teachers by the student and parents. The students hold the teacher to a very high standard at almost an unachievable amount. It is as if we are living in a different world. As for the parents, our expectations are held in all aspects of our lives. We have to have a good background, culture, wardrobe, ideas, and personality. On top of expectations held, it is also hard to relate to students in a hostile environment.

Like in the first story, the teacher felt sort of afraid and intimidated before talking to a group of young African-American students. It could be hard to address certain situations if not exposed to it before. I guess, as a teacher, it is a very "on edge" job. You constantly have to be on the best behavior, act appropriately, show concern to every student, and still be vigilant at the same time. It can be a tough situation and you can't always please everyone, but you have to look up and stay strong otherwise the situation could take a turn for the worse.

The look into the eyes of teachers in similar situations like these was very insuring. It allowed me time to look at how hostile a classroom environment could be for a teacher, and also laid out possible things that could take place.

Nothing But The Truth

In class we were asked to finish reading Nothing But the Truth, and in doing that, I have discovered many things and definitely developed strong opinions. In this case, Philip may have been in the wrong for assuming a teacher had it out for him because of his insubordinate behavior, but I believe that if a child does claim such a rash thing then he should be heard. Regardless of the situation, such a claim can be bad for both the teacher and the child. Instead of thinking Philip was lying they should've had a sit down discussion to work out the details.

On top of that, when the national anthem comes on and Philip starts humming I feel it was wrong for him to be shushed. As a teacher it is time for you to tuck away your pride and let them be. Was he hurting you in any way? Did it do any damage to others? It was a harmless act that got blown way out of proportion and wrapped in lies. In the end, Philip is transferred and cries in shame for not even knowing the words to begin with.

This whole story was a little backwards to me, and the point of reading something of this sort was a little rough. But I found the multi-genre text to be a very easy type to read. Also, in some ways this book was good for helping you do problem solving in your mind. I know I was continuously asking if that was the way things should be handled. All in all, the book wasn't a bad read and you were able to pull some interesting facts and themes out of it.

Introduction: About Me

I am new to the English Education program. Before, I spent most of my time with Biomedical Sciences and I was able to find my passion during a Literary Interpretation course. I love anything athletic! I am a runner, I play soccer, and I am a personal weight trainer.

I am a big volunteer advocate and work at many non-profit organizations within the communities I live in. Also, I am a second year student at Western Michigan University, and I love to travel. My family comes from a small town in Colombia, but I was born and raised in Michigan. Since my senior of high school I have been to 5 countries (Greece, Colombia, France, Germany, and Ireland).