Legend of the Mermaid - Blog for English 493

Eldrich's The Round House -- Blog Post #11 Eldrich's The Round House was a very interesting read. The evolution of Joe, a boy that's barely thirteen into a new Joe after his mother's attack came after several harsh events that shaped the outcome of his choices. The raw aspects of the book, including the open sexual conversations and cursing make this a mature book despite the protagonist being only thirteen. Though those at thirteen have likely learned similar language or spoken in a similar fashion as the characters in the book so they probably relate to it. I thought the most interesting relationships were between Joe and his mother, his father, Mooshum, his friends, and his aunt Sonja. The events involving the priest, Mooshum's sleep stories, and Sonja's striptease for Mooshum seemed to shape after Joe the most other than the final moments in the end where Cappy and Joe murder Linden. From a teaching perspective, I can see how this would be meaningful and ...

Summary // Have No Shame is a historical and coming of age fiction novel published in April 2013. It won the Reader’s Favorite Book Award Gold Medal. Though considered a historical fiction novel, it also contains psychological suspense, romance, and graphic violence. Have No Shame takes place in rural Forrest Town, Arkansas and covers roughly ten months in the life of Allison Tillson, an eighteen-year-old recent high school graduate. The book begins with the main character, Allison, though often referred as Pixie throughout the novel, finds the body of a deceased African American man in the river near her home. She’s horrified and disgusted by the discovery and begins looking at her town in a new light. Suddenly her father is scarier, her fiancé Jimmy Lee, whom she’s been dating for two years, begins to reveal his true colors, and her mother isn’t the meek house wife that Pixie had always thought she was. A couple days later, Jimmy Lee, one of his friends, Corky, and Pixie’s older...

Tovani's I Read It, But I Don't Get It Response -- Blog Post #10 Tovani's book I Read It, But I Don't Get It addressed an obvious problem when it comes to studying and learning - reading comprehension. The book addresses the matter, stating that there is no concise or single answer to the issue but offers strategies to combat it. To have students learn instead of spitting out facts they received from the teacher. That reading was more than just skimming and reading the beginning and ends of a book to fake your way through an assignment. It is understanding what's being read and having an inner interactive dialogue. What I liked most was that Tovani split up these inner voices - calling them the reciting voice, the conversation voice, the interacting voice, and the distracting voice. All of which readers have experienced during the process of reading. Leigha's example of a distracting voice was something I could relate to and understand. She was trying to mak...

edTPA Guidelines & Making Good Choices response I found the edTPA guidelines and making good choices papers as a fairly solid framework for lesson plans and refining them. The guidelines list the basics and then offers questions to narrow down the lesson. As a teacher this is helpful because is tells me as a teacher that I need to have these things for a complete lesson and understand and that I need to know how I want to evaluate my students' work. I also like the section specifically about students answering statements about how and what they're learning to see how far they are progressing. That way I know where they're at in the lesson and if I need to review anything. Also, the last two sections focus on the safety of the lesson and the environment it places the students in as well as connecting to parents and the community. It has the teacher use those sections to express their rationale. The step-by-step process provided in the Making Good Choices article made t...

Work Cited Inchausti, Robert. “Teaching Social Justice in the Classroom.” The Radical Teacher , no. 35, 1988, pp. 30–33. JSTOR , www.jstor.org/stable/20709614.   Social Justice in the Classroom Response -- Blog Post  #8 What is Social Justice? Why is it important for our Classrooms?   Social Justice is the protection of said underrepresented groups. Social Justice Warriors are a group of a people that protects or advocates for marginalized groups such as minorities, the LGBTQ+ community and other underrepresented groups. They protect their rights and provide them a platform to have a voice in today's issues. It's important to have in our classrooms because it gives our students of underrepresented backgrounds a safe space for them to speak and be themselves. In Inchausti's "Teaching Social Justice in the Classroom" he explains an activity he had his class of all boys try. They drew for their social class - wealthy, middle class, and poor - and divid...

 Popular Culture & Media Pedagogy Response -- Blog Post #7 The presence of social media and pop culture in the lives of children have influenced them over the decades in both good ways and bad. They play a large role in the African American community due to being relatable and often unify or divide today's youth. I agree that the media is far from neutral and that all sorts of media have their biases. What it means for students and how it impacts their learning varies though it's not a presence that's fading out anytime soon. It's important for students to be able to sort through news and social media in order to determine accurate conclusions. Literacy and critical reading and thinking are fundamental parts to a whole, tools that can be utilized by students to understand and interpret the messages and media that's always around them. Still, social media and pop culture can still be used as a force of good. Students relate and identify with both on a daily ba...

Caraval, Book Talk #1   “Welcome, welcome to Caraval! The grandest show on land or by sea. Inside you’ll experience more wonders than most people see in a lifetime. You can sip magic from a cup and buy dreams in a bottle. But before you fully enter into our world, you must remember it’s all a game.   What happens beyond this gate may frighten or excite you, but don’t let any of it trick you. We will try to convince you it’s real, but all of it is a performance. A world built of make-believe. So while we want you to get swept away, be careful of being swept too far away. Dreams that come true can be beautiful, but they can also turn into nightmares when people won’t wake up.”   SUMMARY ______ Caraval is the first novel in a fantasy trilogy of the same name, the other two in the series being Legendary and Finale. The main character, seventeen-year-old Scarlett Dragna is the eldest daughter of a cruel and abusive dictator of a small is...

Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter 2 -- Blog Post #6 The use of metaphors right off the bat to describe the banking system of education intrigued me, particularly the concept of the teacher being the subject and the students being objects similar to grammar agreements. The deposit system where students store everything isn't really learning, it's memorizing and it doesn't really benefit the students. It may seem like they're learning because they spit out the facts from a previous lecture but within the context the meaning of the lesson was lost. I agree with Freire that this system is misguided at best and that students aren't meant to be filled up, they're meant to build up their knowledge from learning and understanding, not receiving. Teaching isn't a simple give and take process nor is it one-sided learning. With the banking system, students don't think about what they're storing which loses its qualifications for the technique to be considere...