Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Taking back the Blog
Hello all and no one in particular. I have been doing a fair amount of reading and thinking over the past months. It is about time that some of it should fill up this very screen. For eyes that are intrigued, read on. This blog will now be more commentary with tidbits of poetry or short stories twinkling within. No particular moment will suggest just when the next post will progress, a bit of inspiration or a sensational reading is all that can tell. Enjoy.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Don't be a tourist!
Teaching literature can be a pretty tricky task. What do you do when you are in a classroom and you are supposed to teach a text like Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird? Both of these books have been banned from teaching in certain areas of the country because people might be offended by the texts. This issue of multiculturalism is a very important topic to touch on. In an article by Daniel D. Hade, he states that "Reading is inherently social and is dominated by culture. And the meanings we hold about race, class, and gender mediate how we interpret a text," (Reading Multiculturally 235). This is the way we read, but this is not how it is necessary to read. Hade continues his article by mentioning that we are taught to understand certain topics like race, class, and gender from an early age by the way that we were taught to read. In some of the "children's" books these issues are approached in a skewed way that children may or may not understand, but it instills the fact that they are looking at multiculturism from a tourist perspective. Hade explains a teaching style that he has as, "exposing injustices". When peering at the values that students may accomodate while reading some challenged texts (challenged by the censoring nation) Hade has shown this view, "...we do not want to force meaning upon students like a medicine, but we do want them to think about their assumtions about raace, class, and gender, about the assumtions texts seem to suggest, and how they use these assumtions to interpret text," (238). We must engage so that they can learn to interpret texts.
An intersting experiment took place by a third grade english teacher in the late 1960's. It was an experiment with a classroom of white students who all seemed to know racial biasts but were never really subjected to it themselves. The experiment had the students learn to feel discriminated against. It turned the students against one another based on the color of their eyes. This experiment helped the students to understand how this sort of discrimination felt like and they had that valuable experience to be able to use it in their later days with understanding literary texts.
I feel that books such as Huck Finn and To Kill a Mocking Bird are important texts to have in a classroom. If one politically incorrect thing is in a book...should it be banned forever? I don't think so...what about you?
An intersting experiment took place by a third grade english teacher in the late 1960's. It was an experiment with a classroom of white students who all seemed to know racial biasts but were never really subjected to it themselves. The experiment had the students learn to feel discriminated against. It turned the students against one another based on the color of their eyes. This experiment helped the students to understand how this sort of discrimination felt like and they had that valuable experience to be able to use it in their later days with understanding literary texts.
I feel that books such as Huck Finn and To Kill a Mocking Bird are important texts to have in a classroom. If one politically incorrect thing is in a book...should it be banned forever? I don't think so...what about you?
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Who knew?
Example # 1: When reading, I have always had pictures that formed in my head. Ones that showed what I thought about how a character would look, the setting, and the how the action would take place.
Example # 2: Sometimes when I am in class I draw pictures in my notebook because I know that they will help me to remember concepts better when taking notes.
Example # 3: When a teacher introduces drawing into a classroom as an activity, I always get excited because it is more hands/on and visual than a writing assignment.
These examples are from my own real life experiences. Some people are just better visual learners. That's me. So why does it seem so odd to have a graphic novel in the classroom?
- The answer is that it shouldn't.
Graphic novels are a more modern resource that we as teachers should use as an element in the classroom. You may ask, "What is a graphic novel, but a glorified picture book?" Well that is the way I first looked at them. After taking a dose of these "picture books", I have come to realize that they are so much more.
While reading the graphic novel, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, I have come to realize that they can portray many significant literary aspects of a regular novel while grasping a modern cultural approach that make them more attractive to reluctant readers. This particular graphic novel has a three strand story-line that intertwines over a series of chapters to develop into one theme. The book contained pictures that helped to interpret the story, just like a narrator of a traditional novel. This interesting technique made me think that possibly the use of Graphic Novels in the classroom would be an asset.
Sometimes students are so resistant when it comes to reading, that they ignore assignments altogether. In the book, You Gotta Be the Book, by Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, he has students that refuse to read. After he inquires about some comic books they have with them, he has an idea. He begins to introduce graphic novels to the classroom shelves so that the students can read them during their free reading period. This sparks the reluctant readers and they become so interested that they enjoy learning. One of the students who struggles with reading is Kao. She is in the ESL program. She expresses that she would rather draw her responses to questions because that way people can understand her better. Introducing visual activities into the curriculum can engage all students and possibly give them the opportunity they have been waiting for to shine.
I believe that Graphic Novels can help struggling students as a stepping stone towards discovering the magical places that reading can take the imagination. It helps them to understand the workings of a novel and seek for more material to learn with enthusiasm. Teaching with graphic novels can help students when it comes to writing as well. In an article by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher, they conclude by saying, "Using graphic novels to scaffold writing instruction helped students practice the craft of writing and gain necessary skills to become competent readers."
With that, I say tear down the traditional walls that block the modern culture from intruding into the world of our readers, because the culture is there whether we want it to be or not, so let's use it to our teaching advantage.
Example # 2: Sometimes when I am in class I draw pictures in my notebook because I know that they will help me to remember concepts better when taking notes.
Example # 3: When a teacher introduces drawing into a classroom as an activity, I always get excited because it is more hands/on and visual than a writing assignment.
These examples are from my own real life experiences. Some people are just better visual learners. That's me. So why does it seem so odd to have a graphic novel in the classroom?
- The answer is that it shouldn't.
Graphic novels are a more modern resource that we as teachers should use as an element in the classroom. You may ask, "What is a graphic novel, but a glorified picture book?" Well that is the way I first looked at them. After taking a dose of these "picture books", I have come to realize that they are so much more.
While reading the graphic novel, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, I have come to realize that they can portray many significant literary aspects of a regular novel while grasping a modern cultural approach that make them more attractive to reluctant readers. This particular graphic novel has a three strand story-line that intertwines over a series of chapters to develop into one theme. The book contained pictures that helped to interpret the story, just like a narrator of a traditional novel. This interesting technique made me think that possibly the use of Graphic Novels in the classroom would be an asset.
Sometimes students are so resistant when it comes to reading, that they ignore assignments altogether. In the book, You Gotta Be the Book, by Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, he has students that refuse to read. After he inquires about some comic books they have with them, he has an idea. He begins to introduce graphic novels to the classroom shelves so that the students can read them during their free reading period. This sparks the reluctant readers and they become so interested that they enjoy learning. One of the students who struggles with reading is Kao. She is in the ESL program. She expresses that she would rather draw her responses to questions because that way people can understand her better. Introducing visual activities into the curriculum can engage all students and possibly give them the opportunity they have been waiting for to shine.
I believe that Graphic Novels can help struggling students as a stepping stone towards discovering the magical places that reading can take the imagination. It helps them to understand the workings of a novel and seek for more material to learn with enthusiasm. Teaching with graphic novels can help students when it comes to writing as well. In an article by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher, they conclude by saying, "Using graphic novels to scaffold writing instruction helped students practice the craft of writing and gain necessary skills to become competent readers."
With that, I say tear down the traditional walls that block the modern culture from intruding into the world of our readers, because the culture is there whether we want it to be or not, so let's use it to our teaching advantage.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Angles
"The seminal quality of writing is that it is 'transformational' or life changing in some way,"(Wilhelm, 51).
When reading a book, I find it good to see the text from different angles. "You Gotta Be the Book", by Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, has many endearing aspects that can assist a teaching student with their methodology when it comes to teaching students to love reading. Wilhelm mentioned that as teachers, we are not only assigning books to keep up with the curriculum, we are helping in the transformation of students from classroom readers to the kind of readers they will be in the future.
Taken from one angle, the book gives scenarios about students that enjoy reading and their views on books, teaching styles, and the overall enthusiasm to learn. I found myself identifying with beliefs. The students generally enjoy reading and have a thirst for knowledge. We as upcoming teachers must fill that thirst with an enjoyable challenge. The challenge can come in different forms, it can be to help identify reading options that they may not have considered previously, to give them a more challenging book to understand, or to have them work on their writing skills by asking them to express how they feel about reading. From this angle, you can see the students willingness to comply with the challenge, which will render positive results in the classroom.
I also looked at the text from a merely teacher based angle and found that Wilhelm challenges some old age conventional ideas about what constitutes literature. From his frame of mind, it has helped me to understand that we are teaching because we want students to want to learn. If that means that instead of reading Huckleberry Finn, we introduce them to the Twilight Saga, maybe then they will be wanting to learn instead of hiding their sparknotes in their backpacks. We want the students to want to be readers, so we have to be willing to listen to what catches their attention and go from there.
When reading a book, I find it good to see the text from different angles. "You Gotta Be the Book", by Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, has many endearing aspects that can assist a teaching student with their methodology when it comes to teaching students to love reading. Wilhelm mentioned that as teachers, we are not only assigning books to keep up with the curriculum, we are helping in the transformation of students from classroom readers to the kind of readers they will be in the future.
Taken from one angle, the book gives scenarios about students that enjoy reading and their views on books, teaching styles, and the overall enthusiasm to learn. I found myself identifying with beliefs. The students generally enjoy reading and have a thirst for knowledge. We as upcoming teachers must fill that thirst with an enjoyable challenge. The challenge can come in different forms, it can be to help identify reading options that they may not have considered previously, to give them a more challenging book to understand, or to have them work on their writing skills by asking them to express how they feel about reading. From this angle, you can see the students willingness to comply with the challenge, which will render positive results in the classroom.
I also looked at the text from a merely teacher based angle and found that Wilhelm challenges some old age conventional ideas about what constitutes literature. From his frame of mind, it has helped me to understand that we are teaching because we want students to want to learn. If that means that instead of reading Huckleberry Finn, we introduce them to the Twilight Saga, maybe then they will be wanting to learn instead of hiding their sparknotes in their backpacks. We want the students to want to be readers, so we have to be willing to listen to what catches their attention and go from there.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Blog #1 - Identifying with the books
Literacy Profile
I consider myself a reader. A reader not only a reader for content, but more like a reader ingesting the words, the formats, the ideas, and the tones in one rather large breath. I find the enjoyment of reading in books and plays sprinkled with wit and coated with brilliantly developed characters and plot. I enjoy perusing around the shelves of the fiction section and inching towards intriguing titles with a grasping hand.
As I recall, the very first book I mastered was Dr. Seuss' Hop on Pop. The pictures and letters finally formed meaning with me at nighttime in my bed around the age of four and a half. For the next four years or so, I read when necessary, not fully grasping the grand span of ideas that could be found in books. One summer, when I was around the age of 8, my mother came up with a reward system for reading. The reward was monetary for every book read. This was the only summer that my mother ever offered such a reward for I believe I read at least 25 books. This sparked my love of reading and I no longer read for a physical reward; my bank of knowledge of literature and vocabulary grew immensely. As an adolescent, I filled my reading time with books of adventure. Series including, The Boxcar Children, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Harry Potter, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and Twilight all lined my shelves along with many Border's purchases and of course the Classics. I was drawn to Adventure, Mystery, and Classical fiction novels.
In school, I usually enjoyed reading the novels chosen. Some of which included, Fahrenheit 451, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", The Devil's Arithmetic, Huckleberry Finn, and "Death of a Salesman". These titles I would consider to be classics or books that could teach an element of literature specifically. I would consider myself a very motivated reader, but I also know that there were a number of classmates that were reluctant to read or neglected the literature all together. For my own students, I would take an interactive approach to teaching literature so that they can see that it is not a bunch of letters on a page, but a series of well-crafted ideas strung together in a memorable arrangement of words that elicit an emotion response. I see literacy as not only reading, but a thirst for understanding.
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