PYTASH: Choosing Which Books to Teach

I not-so-secretly love this textbook. That is something very hard for me to say. I LOVE that Jago has decided to really PUSH her students. She injects a little bit of humor into her writing when she says, "My sophomore students read a total of twenty books. Do students struggle to keep up? Of course they do! We are not working in the Zone of Minimal Effort." This is TOTALLY something I want to keep in mind as a future teacher!!! I loved her lists of books and her outside class reading assignments.
I feel that if I would have had Jago as a teacher I would have really disliked her in the beginning but at the end of the year I would have loved her. I would have thought, "Wow, I had a teacher who expected me to act like an adult and really pushed me. I learned so much more in her classroom than I would have learned in another."
I also really liked that she wanted to see if she could get a program in place where the students track their reading over the 4 years at high school. I feel that would have a tremendous impact on students so that way when they graduated, they would be able to see how much they did learn and maybe revisit some of the things they may have forgotten about later on in life.
While perusing Youtube, I found this little video of Carol Jago talking about papers.

PYTASH: Seven Guiding Principles for Literature Teachers

Is it just me or do I feel that the first page of Chapter 1 has, for lack of a better word, negated what we are learning in multimodals. "Too many students are doing everything but reading" (Jago 1). I literally giggled just a little after reading that first guiding principle. I am glad, however, that it was followed up with "While these projects may help to engage students in their reading, they must be used sparingly and should always be accompanied by a writing assignment" (Jago 1-2). This whole guiding principle reminds me of a teacher I had in high school whose idea of an assessment on Poe was "Draw a family crest for the Usher family and present it to the class" and that was all. I remembered even as a student being outraged that I was going to do something that was not engaging me at a higher level, especially since it was HONORS English!




Something else I really found to resonate with me about this chapter was in the 5th principle. Jago wrote something to the effect about how she showed her students a short clip of the 1939 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame and never finished watching the rest of the movie. She said it was just to help the students start having a visual image about the text they were reading. I think this is a tactic I would want to use in my own classroom because I know some students may have a hard time creating visual images in their head.

FOOT: Video Games In the Classroom

I have really mixed feelings about this article. Part of me thinks that it is really neat that they are able to use a game format in the school setting. I'm sure that the kids are really interested in this format because of its multimodality. It is in a format that the student's are really able to connect to. When I was reading this, I thought of the computer games I played as a child. This was something I left out of my autobiography and I wish I would have included!
When I was younger, my sister Mary and I used to play these games on the computer. I always wanted to try and get ahead of the grade level that I was at to really challenge myself. It was in video game format so it was similar to what they were talking about in the article. Yet, my mom got me these as a supplemental material. I think because I want to be a teacher, I really like the traditional school idea slightly more. I would love to be able to incorporate video games as supplemental material but I'm still unsure how I feel about a school where video games play such an important role. It's probably because I am the type of person who can't stare at a screen for hours without getting a headache.

A quote that stood out to me was: "Doyle leaned back in his chair. Had he taught anything? Had they learned anything?" I feel like there are some classrooms that you might go into and ask "Had they learned anything?" and to have to apply it to another level where kids are playing with video games might be an even tougher question to answer.

FOOT: Little Brother (Part 2)

I was really disappointed with the way Little Brother ended. The fact that Severe Haircut got off really made me upset. I feel slightly let down. Even though the ending wasn't to my taste, I feel that there are really good discussion ideas from the themes in this book. Overall, it has some really good ideas, but the whole sex thing threw me for a loop and I didn't feel it was totally necessary because it neither added or subtracted to the plot. Since the sex thing is in the book, I could see it presenting possible problems with readers or parents of students in my class.
The whole censorship thing might make this a book that would be hard to teach. I'm sure that there are parents out there who would really disagree with reading a book that featured 2 teenagers having sex, even though it wasn't overly graphic. I would really like to use this book in my future classroom, I'm just afraid that the sex thing will really put it on the censorship chopping block.

ALSO: I AM SO HAPPY THAT LARPING ACTUALLY CAME INTO PLAY WITH THE PLOT!!!
(I know, I'm such a nerd :-D)

FOOT: Pleasure Watching of the Packers Beating the Steelers

So as most people know, last night was the Superbowl. The Green Bay Packers won over the Pittsburg Steelers. Being a Browns fan, I rooted for the Packers. Yet, as I checked my Facebook during halftime (because I do not like the Black Eyed Peas) I couldn't help notice all of the status updates about the game, the commercials, and even twitter updates that are linked to facebook about the game. I saw that at least 5 friends had posted at roughly the same time about Christina Agulera missing a line of the national anthem criticizing her. They said things like "how could you be so stupid and mess up one song that everyone knows, I could have sung it better" and other variations of such. At first, I sided with them considering pretty much every sporting event in America will sing the national anthem before hand. Yet, as I thought more about it, I put myself in her position. MILLIONS of people are watching and she might have been nervous or something.
I felt almost angry at my friends for making remarks about her messing up once when they probably couldn't have done it at all if they were in her position. People may make fun of the times people forget things on "Jay Walking" on the Jay Leno Show but I'm sure if they had the same pressure on them, they probably couldn't have done any better.

Anyway, unrelated to the Steelers or Packers, I hope next year the Browns have a winning season. I have no idea if they will make it to the superbowl (in all reality probably not but its' always nice to hope) but I do hope next year will be better.

FOOT: Autobiography Update (Part 2: We're going to need another Timmy)

Here is another thing I found when searching Youtube for things to include in my multigenre autobiography. The more I search, the more I realize two things. One is that some of the things I used to watch as a kid was crazy and some of it has a totally different meaning now. Another thing is that the TV that is on now it boring in comparison. Granted there are the TV shows that I like but I feel nothing can really compare to what used to be on. Now TV is filled with reality and game shows. As I was thinking about it, there are really only 3 TV shows that are not reality show based: Chuck, Being Human (the US version...Sorry!), and The Office. Otherwise it is shows like Say Yes to the Dress, Real Housewives (Beverly Hills), TLC, Discovery, and History Channel shows. I feel compelled to find all of my favorite shows from the 90s on DVD to show my future children because some of the stuff that is on today scares me.

ALSO I need to find this movie somewhere! I remember watching it when I was younger and I want to watch it again!

FOOT: Socially Networked Classroom

As I am reading through the Kist book, I find myself liking the ideas presented in the text. Around page 12, Dr. Kist wrote about the Multigenre Autobiography. While making my own for class and reading this book, I think this would be a great tool to use in my future classroom. Since at the beginning of the year, many people are hesitant about being in a new class with a new teacher and new students. I think that it is a great way for people to get to know a little more about each other. Also, I remember talking in one of the prior education courses I've taken about sharing appropriate information about yourself with the class. By modeling this activity with my own Multigenre Autobiography, I think it would be a way for my future class to see a little about what I like to read and other texts I enjoy.
Another thing I am noticing while reading is the way the book is formatted. I know it might seem silly that this is something that sticks out to me but it is. I find it much easier to read this text because the activities are boxed off and little key phrases or questions are in shaded boxes. If this book was just 100% text throughout the page without the areas being sectioned off, I would probably have a much harder time reading this text since it is non-fiction.
On page 62 and 63, I really enjoy the literature circle section and rubric. I personally really enjoyed literature circles when we used them in Dr. Pytash's class last semester. Last semester we were participating in them and this section kind of helps to establish how to uses them from the teacher side of things.