My Thoughts on Things

Empathy. It seems to be a theme among good books. At least somewhere in a good novel we find empathy. This novel had me feeling empathetic the whole way through. I found myself often hoping for things to somehow get better and more clear for not only the main character but for the supporting characters as well. There is a constant feeling of sadness for the situation these characters are experiencing. To start the story the mother of the main character gets raped. This theme continues and the story line never looks up from this point. The second the incident occurs, the minds of every character became frantic and motivated with the right motives, but the wrong ideas for doing so. The main character in this novel Joe, is constantly going against what people are telling him and against what is morally right and wrong. Joe starts off with good intentions trying to give his mother justice and peace, but ends up fueling himself with a hate fire that leads to him being an accomplice in a mur...

After reading the first chapter of this book, I had found myself very interested in what the author Cris Tovani had to say about comprehension strategies. Tovani talks about having students come in on the first day of class with expectations of how the English class would go. Tovani explains to the students in a very honest way that she knows pointless assessments and how much students hate them. She understands all of their hate towards writing and empathizes with them. She tells the students that as much as they don't want to write a book report, he doesn't want to grade 30 of them. She talks about knowing how students fake reading and writing all of the time, and how she did so as a kid. Her approach was new to me. I have never heard of a teacher being so honest to their students before. She does this to get all of the things in student's heads out in the open. Her approach to creating readers and writers who critically think and analyze vs. students who fake read and wr...

After reading the TPA guidelines and the edTPA Making good choices, I found myself writing notes about some of the points I found useful in both documents that I need to include when it comes to taking my edTPA. Being a teacher candidate at Eastern who will be taking her edTPA in a couple of months, this information seemed very useful and like something I would want to remember when for the future. They both include very important points about how to make an edTPA in the best possible way. They both serve as great guidelines for what we as candidates should think about when creating our own edTPA's. It gives us an example of parts of the handbook that we need to include and focus on when creating our edTPA's, and it explains how to understand these sections as well. I found a specific area in the "edTPA making good choices" of understanding the handbook rubrics. This section was particularly interesting because it explains in detail how to even understand what the rub...

What is social justice? Why is it important for our classrooms? While searching for a text that either explains or embodies social justice, I found myself at a loss for finding something I truly felt did the phrase justice. I decided to look at the opposite side of the question to find an article or book and found myself coming back to a book I have shared before. The novel SOLD which I have talked about in a previous blog post. This book to me is social injustice. The book travels through the world of a girl getting sold into the sex slave trade in India. These young girls are forced to be raped many times a day and are imprisoned for the rest of their lives (which is not that long considering the fact that they can contract diseases from their encounters). These girls have not chosen this life, they are stolen, tricked, and sold into this life with no way out but death. This to me is social injustice. Social injustice to me fits into many categories and not just this one, it can be...

Book Talk “ Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret ” By: Judy Blume Summary : This book is about the crazy pre-teen life of Margaret Simon, a 12 year old girl who is moving from the big city to the suburbs. As she makes a group of friends in her new school, she finds herself in a whole new world filled with girl talk about boys, changing bodies and oddly enough religion. Her new friends are shocked to find out that Margaret does not have a religion considering the fact that they all do. What Margaret does not tell her friends however, is her constant conversation with God about everything. This book follows this young girl around while she is facing some of the most relatable problems that pre-teen girls face, and how she overcomes those problems. Rationale : I chose this book because I teach this age of students in my practicum, and I had received this book as a pre-teen as well. I remember reading this book and relating very heavily to it. This book would probably be most app...

Using pop culture and critical media in the classroom is always a hot button issue that we as future teachers need to consider when lesson planning. Should we bring pop culture into the classroom? should we try to take meaning out of the words said in songs or through movies? Or should we keep pop culture out of the curriculum because it might bring forward controversy? This article suggests several ideas as to how we as teachers can bring pop culture into the classroom in a fun way for students, that yields a higher success in understanding the learning target at hand. Some ways the author mentions using pop culture songs in the classroom in several ways such as : "a. Examining the messages that artists are trying to send through their songs to promote discussions among students. b. Looking at the experiences of the artists and having the students relate to their own experiences. c. English teachers can examine the use of language in hip-hop and how it relates students’ use of la...

Pedagogy: The why and the how of teaching and learning. How do we take these ideas and apply them to our classroom? After reading this chapter of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I found myself both enlightened and confused. To be honest, some of his professions of education were filled with fire and truth, while others left me with a slightly tilted head and many questions. He was trying to create a revolution, and instill a fire within us as teachers. Paulo writes "The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable." This sentence is something I agree with in being part of the reason that their is a problem with education. We as teachers need to make our teaching applicable to students. Not bringing in situations that are not applicable at all to students. I have noticed this myself in my own classroom. I have students who will completely check out if they think the information will never be useful for them in...