Pytash: Jago Ch. 6

Lesson Design for Classical Literature

I felt like a student in Ms. Jago's classroom, trying to digest The Odyssey for the first time. I have never read this novel before and had to stop many times throughout chapter six to try to recollect what was happening. When Jago was talking about the lesson studies in Japan, she talked about them having a national curriculum. This is something that I wish the United States had because then I wouldn't have to feel like I was still in middle school trying to figure out what she is talking about throughout this whole chapter. On page 112 she talked about how she expected that student's had some experience with the Greek gods, but they don't always. I am her nightmare student. We talked about Greek gods my sophomore year, but never after that and truly I don't remember a thing I was taught. Lessons vary on the region and school district you go to. It's so frustrating to me because people talk about books like everyone in the whole world has read them and I haven't even heard of them. Perhaps if we had a national curriculum, then I wouldn't feel so much in the dark. 

Jago talked about the Writing Project and how "[her] writing group helped [her] see that with attention to detail [her] errors could be easily corrected" (99). This is something that could be incorporated in schools. Teachers expect different things out of students each year and when they don't have what he/she expects they go home thinking they're a failure. Why couldn't the school have the mentality that the Writing Project had and show the students that they can easily fix their mistakes and will be set to go? 

I took the lesson design for The Odyssey step by step. If we were going to study The Odyssey then I would have jotted down a lot more notes, but a lot of the things I wrote down was to remind myself the gender of a god or what happened previously, so I can apply it to the next paragraph. The character chart she suggested to students was a great idea. There are so many people to try to remember that it's best to write them down, so you can see who is who and how they are related to the other characters. Also, the map would help me personally because I'm a visual learner and I can't read something and understand it or try to keep it all in my brain. 

This story is an epic and I enjoyed the epithets and epic simile section because that is not something I had learned before. Allowing students to create their own versions of these will make them feel connected to the text. There is only so much you can do with the text itself, but I think it leaves a barrier between the child and the text. If the child can use what they learned in the text and apply it to something else, then that is true understanding. 

As always, I questioned her section on homework. She said, "Some teachers try to solve this problem by carving out class time for reading, but even one day a week or fifteen minutes a day will decrease the time you have for discussion and interaction by 20 percent" (Jago 130). Last semester we just learned the importance of silent reading and how it is rarely done in classes and students need to continually read to benefit from it. I think it's important to allow students a little bit of time in the classroom. If not, then they will think it's just read the book at home and then drill me in the classroom. What if the students are having trouble with a specific section, are you just going to say "we don't have time for that because we need to have a discussion?" I would hope not. Instead I would hope you would guide the student through the section and then offer them to read it over again and then have the discussion. Reading at home is essential, but not allowing time in class for the students is like saying silent reading is not as important as our discussions and I don't think Jago would agree with that because without reading you can have no discussion.

I believe the expert group assignment is what we will be doing with The Great Gatsby. Students can gain confidence through mastering just one chapter of a text. That chapter might be difficult and might place the student above their Zone of Minimal Effort, but with the help of their peers they should see that they are capable of what they previously thought was impossible. Combining multiple minds, offers many viewpoints and ideas to lead a discussion.

Pytash: Jago Ch. 4

How Stories Work

We probably learned about literary elements in grade school, but they continue to be just as important and at times deceiving today as they were back then. On page 61, Jago had a list of the mostly W words that lead to figuring out the literary elements. Who-> characters, Where and When -> setting, What, Why and How -> plot, So what-> author's purpose and theme. This would be a good chart to put up in the classroom, so students can always have reference to it when reading a book. Freytag's pyramid is another chart that could be posted in the room. It might help students identify the part of the book they are reading. Knowing where the section of the story is on Freytag's Pyramid could help them in determining the author's tone and purpose at some circumstances.

"Effort imprints the reading on students' minds" (Jago 67). Student's seem to remember stories that took them more effort than those that were a breeze. This could be like people remembering bad things more than they remember good things. It takes more effort to solve a hard or bad situation than an easy one, where practically no effort is needed. Helping students reach the steps to understand a more complicated novel would guide them to use those steps later in solving another complicated novel. Rather than just telling them what's happening, you will let them learn themselves, so they will be able to apply it in the future.

Foot: Multigenre Autobiography

I think the multigenre autobiography would be a good assignment for the beginning of the year. Students will just have come back from summer vacation and their brains probably won't be up to par. The assignment doesn't require a lot of deep thought, but a lot can be learned from it. Also, there might be new students in your classroom and this would be an easy way to break the ice and get students better acquainted with one another. I like the idea of giving students some time in class to work on the project, so if they have any pertinent questions you can try to help them out.

One thing that I think would work better when showing the presentations, is to have a time restraint that is the same for everyone. When introducing the project, I think I would say that it can be no more than seven minutes and that if you bring it to class with more than that, then you won't be allowed to present. It's not fair to the people at the end, who only got like five minutes to present and others took like 15 minutes. In order to keep the presentations fair, having equal time before it starts would help solve that. It also is important that you make sure students aren't presenting to try and persuade other students to like what they like. It's OK to think what you liked was the best, but it's not OK to be overbearing and try to make others guilty for not liking it. The last restriction I could think of is that if you're going to ask everyone to write comments about others presentations, then you make sure everyone writes the comments. It's not fair to the students, who spent time writing thoughtful responses to others, yet some of those others didn't even take the time to send any responses at all. If it was my classroom, I would give all of the students enough strips of paper for the number of students in the classroom minus themselves, so they can write their responses on there. Then at the end of the period, the students will pass back their comment strips. The comment wouldn't have to be elaborate and would not be a strict question, just anything to comment on a specific of their presentation. Each student will count their comment strips to make sure everyone has the exact same amount.

One idea I got from watching the shows in class was that you could have students pick three favorites from everybody's presentations. It could be a movie, book, or tv show. Then you could list all of the favorites and have students break up into groups based on their favorite and do a group project on that title. This would further the getting to know you aspect by bringing together what may seem to be different students with an interest in the same move, book, tv show, etc.

Personally I would like to use the inspirational books that I enjoy reading in my future classroom. I read Tuesdays With Morrie in high school and that book has stuck with me since then. I don't want students to think that they come to English class to learn information that they will leave in that classroom and never use again. Books that have life meaning are important to me and I think they would have more application in student's lives than some other texts. While I do love the outdoors and baking, I'm having a hard time incorporating that into the classroom. Even though I would love to, It's not like I can just say OK we're going to bake today. Something that I could do would be to take my students outside for class. I don't know how many schools allow that, but we did it at my high school. The last application I have from my personal autobiography is my love for sports. Not very many people mentioned that in our class, but a lot of students are sports junkies. Just being able to have conversations with students about sports will make them feel valued. Also, I could have sport-like strategies. In high school we use to play basketball and baseball review games for tests. We didn't actually play the sports, but a simplified in the classroom activity like it.

Foot: Online Articles

Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

            These articles do not really seem like scholarly articles to me. It’s not that they aren’t accurate, but  the rest of the class and I have been living this for the past five years, at least. We know firsthand experience on having Facebook before the News Feed and after. We also know about uploading pictures and tagging where you are. For older people, this article would probably be fascinating because it’s so different from their usual lives, but for us it’s just an everyday encounter.

            I was pleased to learn the term ambient awareness. That is so true. We do get attached to people and feel that we know them after reading their posts. I thought this quote was funny, yet true, “It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said. Facebook is like a little village, where everyone knows the business of everyone else. I come from a little village, so practically nothing of mine can be kept a secret, unless I don’t tell anyone, which is the smartest thing to do if you want it to be kept private. It’s not long before one person tells someone else, who in turn tells another person. At times you have to think before posting something, but then again, shouldn’t we always think before we speak?

You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?

            This article is true, and while we are leaving a trail of where we have been, when haven’t we done that in the past? Most of us are 20 years-old. Until college we were kept track of at least 180 days a year. In the summer you might have had a little freedom, but still most likely someone knew where you were and a round of a bout idea of what you were doing. People seem like they would not live without their cell phones. We might be being tracked on them, but couldn’t the government wire tap our landlines as well? I’m sure a lot of this information gets documented, but how much actually gets used? I think it’s freaky that people are watching your every step, but I also think there can be things done about it. There was a girl on the news the other day that said she regularly goes to the gym and one day a guy added her on Facebook and wrote her some kind of note. She was freaked out by this because she never had met him, told him her name, or wore a shirt with her name on it. She didn’t know how he found out who she was. If I was that girl, I would easily be identifiable. For one, I wear shirts from my high school or races all the time and there are not very many people with my last name. It’s not hard to figure things out, once you know a little. What I was trying to show was it doesn’t have to be media to follow someone. Sure the guy was following her on Facebook, but he first had to follow her at the gym to even be able to add her on Facebook.

Letter From Japan. I <3 Novels.

            This article about a different type of novels related to me how children and adults can read anything and get benefits out of it. People were unsure of the cell-phone novels because they were written backwards, and originally written on a phone. It did not comply with their ordinary standards. I think it is a great way to get a story down. It’s not the most conventional but it works and allows people, mostly girls to tell their story. In the articles it talked about how the cell-phone novels tell what girls already know. That might be true, but it seems to me that’s what intrigues them and gives them an ally in hard times.

Pytash: Jago Ch. 2- All About Words

I was excited to find Jago used Edgar Allan Poe in this chapter because that is who I have to complete the twenty instructional ideas for our class wiki, although I will not use any of the strategies she talks about because we will have all read them by then, plus there are a ton available on the web. 

She reiterates something that I think we have been discussing a lot in our classes: words! I recently read an article talking about how boys lag behind in developing their vocabulary and because of that they have more behavior problems. Jago says, "Vocabulary experts tell us that for reasonable reading comprehension a student needs to know 90-95 percent of the words" (Jago 22). This makes sense because how are students supposed to be able to comprehend a text if they don't know a majority of the words. One thing that I think is decreasing the amount of words students know is the lack of dictionaries available. I can remember working in dictionaries and regularly looking up words; now I rarely see dictionaries in every classroom. Perhaps teachers rely on digital forms of dictionaries, but that could keep them in hiding and deter students from looking up unknown words. 

We all went through those classes where every week you got your new list of vocabulary words on Monday, turned in using them in a sentence on Tuesday and on Friday you had a test over them. A lot of those words I memorized for the test and haven't used them since. We had the occasional word searches too. If you read the chart on "what to do" and "what not to do" on page 32, then you will see everything I just mentioned is in the "Don't do" section. We need to teach words that students are going to remember and are going to use again, not leave them behind after the quiz. Jago identifies three criteria for choosing words. The first one is importance and utility. Pick words that the students will see reoccuringly throughout many of their classes. The second criterion is instructional potential. Pick either words that have more than one way of being used or can be used to modify different types of words, so students can use them interchangeably. The last criterion is conceptual understanding. Use words that students understand but are concise in meaning and make a clear description when being used. Those three criteria are on page 28. Picking words for students to understand is crucial to their learning and following those three criteria might ease the burden of teaching student's new words.

Foot: Kist Book- "Venti"

"What happens when a school allows students to do some work at home?" (Kist 99)

In all actuality schools already do allow students to do work at home. Practically every night students have homework that they are to complete at home and bring back the night day. Not many people see a problem with that, yet they complain about students having to do work on Nings, Blogs, and Facebook. I personally see and understand both sides. First off, I'm not a huge fan of homework. Yes, I believe you need it, but some teachers think that they are just to teach the students how to do something and then everything else is to be done outside of the classroom. More times than not, I don't think teachers realize how much homework they assign. Students just have to try and complete all that they can. I'm not so sure what's the huge difference between allowing them to do homework, but not allowing them to work on their blogs. Blogs do require internet access and a lot of homes still do not have that access. This is something that more people need to be aware of. Just because you have something doesn't mean everyone else does. For this reason, I don't think blogs should be required for only outside of class work.

I'm not so much a fan of hybrid classes. I have had a few online classes in college, and that has helped me tremendously because I took them in the summer, so I wouldn't have to drive over two hours a day to take them on campus. I don't think that high school students are mature enough to learn on their own. Some may take it seriously, but a lot of students, I think, would spend the day goofing off and not really working on their assignment. In my hometown they have a program called Quaker Digital Academy. This program allows students that don't want to go to school to do their work at home. The academy gives them a laptop and pays for internet access for them. It sounds like a great idea, but who really wants to stay home all day and just do schoolwork? That's definitely not for me, but it works great for some students; although, some end up failing out because they aren't held accountable. Going back to the text, I was stunned when Liz said, "I don't ever talk in class. I don't lecture ever. I just sit next to kids. The class turns into a workshop" (Kist 101). Really? She doesn't ever talk in the classroom and just sits beside the students? You can have students leading the class and letting them learn on their own, but you need to speak. Where is personal face-to-face communication going to go if a teacher does not even speak in her own room? That comment outraged me, and makes me like hybrid classes even less.

Foot: Pleasure Reading

I was reading a note on Facebook that a teacher from my hometown wrote the other day. She is a sixth grade English teacher and was at the Ohio Middle Level Conference. There she learned about Senate Bill 5. The general consensus of it is that pay will go to a merit based system. I'm sure we all have heard about this in the past, but I guess it's getting closer to being put into effect. It not only will affect teachers and people in the school system, but also firefighters and policemen. It too would eliminate sick leave for teachers. This bill is very extensive and I don't know all of the facts, so I don't feel that it's right that I go on and on about it when I haven't heard all that she did. What I did want to do was bring to your attention that this could potentially go into place, and how would you feel about being paid based on how your students do on a test. In a post for Dr. Pytash's class, I wrote how unfair it is to students if their only grades are on tests and quizzes. Again, this seems a little extreme to me to base a teachers pay off of how his or her student's do on a single test. It feels like they are trying to make everything so standardized and I don't feel you can make every teacher the same. There are other ways of evaluating teachers than by their students test scores. I think we need to look further into the situation, instead of going with the first idea that appears would work. Below I have listed a few links on Senate Bill 5. 

1. This link talks about a lot of new bills in both the House and Senate  
2. This one is just on Senate Bill 5
3. This last link talks about two retired teachers view on the bill.

Pytash: Chapter 5- How Poems Work

Poetry is usually despised by students. Unless you're one of the fortunate ones, who understands it and can break the code, you probably wish that it would have never been thought of. This chapter brought a lot of things to the forefront that I think will help me in not only teaching poetry in the future, but help me understand a little clearer. She begins the chapter talking about how students recognize poetry in song lyrics. Everyone knows song lyrics, and it seems to me that I can listen to a song a few times and get part of the lyrics, but I can read a poem fifty times and not understand what they are talking about. Showing the link between poetry and lyrics might help students want to dive into understanding what the author is trying to say. 

I was surprised to see that Jago thinks the students will enjoy the poems. She said, "I begin the study of poetry with the assumption that students will love these rich texts..." (Jago 76). I would have thought she would go into the process thinking that the students would hate the poems, so she had a plan B to put into action in case they weren't enthused. Perhaps having an attitude like she does, shows the students how eager she is and they feed off of her energy.

I really hate classrooms where the only evaluations are tests of some sort. Not everyone is capable of passing those types of assessments. Some students may be geniuses at the subject, but tests and quizzes just aren't their cup of tea. For this reason, I like that Jago had the word wall of literary terms and made students write down the words themselves. I, too, agree that writing it in your own handwriting processes it in  your brain better. Her metaphor seemed to resonate with me, "Like water dripping onto earth, the definitions become part of students' working vocabulary" (Jago 77). It's like the words just sink into them; they are immersed in the literary language. 

A lot of times that we read poems in class, the teacher gave us background information first. Sometimes it worked and other times I spent daydreaming. Jago wrote, "The problem is that young readers don't have a place to store this information until they have made some sense of the text for themselves" (77). From that I agree with her way of reading the poem and then reading about the background information. It might make students pay attention more; if they know what the poem was about and could apply some of the background information back to why he or she wrote the way they did.

One question that I had was about her comment on teachers stopping instruction after a personal response has been made. I'm not one-hundred percent sure I know what she was talking about. I'm assuming that a lot of teachers just want you to be able to connect with the text and respond yourself, and after that they think the lesson is through. I wish she would have explained more about what to do afterward because it seems that she just jumped right to having a discussion, which from my understanding was still on  their reactions to the poem.

Foot: Great Films and How to Teach Them

Chapter 2: The Language of Film
     The beginning of this chapter made me chuckle a little. He was talking about making sense of different movies, and how we come to understand the different aspects of a film. All of the examples he gave were from people in other countries. They are not American, so of course they aren't going to understand what we understand. We have grown up with these types of things, and so it's like second nature to us. I wish he would have touched on Americans and how they make sense of movies because I think he would find that we don't have to sit through a class or read something to understand the basis of what the filmmaker was trying to convey. 

One part I did enjoy was where he talked about signs and referents. "...The signifier is the photographic image-patterns of shade and color on the screen-and the signified is the mental image-what those patterns evoke in our imagination" (Costanzo 18). So technically the signifier and the signified do not always go together; they have to correlate in order for us to see the right image and for us to feel the feeling they intended. He continued to talk about how much work goes into a film, to crop every shot, and make it the feeling they want. This eventually led to his statement, "images evoke assertions; words evoke images" (Costanzo 19). This kind have relates to my first post on the beginning of the book. I talked about how a film shows you what they want you to feel and a book let's you form your own interpretation. He reiterated that thought by his comment on how concrete images are and how flexible words can be.

Foot: Great Films and How to Teach Them

Chapter One

      A lot of my personal thoughts came up in little pieces of the beginning of the book. I'm not much of a movie person; I would rather be doing something more active. So to sit down and read a book about films was a bit of a challenge. My first thought was that the book is ALWAYS better. While I absolutely believe that William Costanzo hit on a few things that put me in a bit of a different perspective. I knew I wasn't alone when he wrote, "... for all the critical complaints that 'the book was better,' three out of hour Academy Awards for Best Picture have gone to adaptations" (Costanzo 10). I can understand that. Movie theaters are a hit and people enjoy going out and relaxing while watching a film. Who wouldn't think that a good book would be a good movie? Sure, it could be good, but the Academy Awards doesn't compare the two, so just because they say it won doesn't mean it's better than the book. 

This leads me to his ending point. "Viewed from these perspectives, a movie adaptation is not so much an illustrated copy of a book but a new rendering of the story, to be appreciate on its own terms" (Costanzo 15). A book is a book and a film is a film. They might both portray the same story, but there is no way that they will both make you envision or feel the same way. I like reading a book because I see the words in my head and get to form my own opinion of how the story looks. A film shows you how something looks, and so it is completely different than the book. I agree with him, and think that they should be in two different categories. A film could be astonishing by itself, but to book enthusiasts it might not be that great. That doesn't mean they should degrade the movie because it didn't meet their expectations. I think it's something for myself to consider, looking at a movie in a different lens than I did the book.

Foot: Parent Report Cards

On the Today Show, Hoda Kotb and Kathy Lee Gifford reported on a new kind of report card. This one is projected to be evaluated on parents. Cheers! I mentioned in a post for Dr. Pytash's class that we need to hold parents accountable. People expect teachers to do everything and that's simply not their jobs. Like Gifford mentioned, it's not a teachers job to teach morals and values. I'm not sure how the report card will be implemented, but I can see this as something to come in the future. First students were evaluated, then teachers were, and now finally parents. It really is a disadvantage for a students to have a parent that simply doesn't care. I was fortunate enough to have two parents that taught me about life outside of the classroom as well as made sure my schoolwork was done correctly before I went back the next day. In order to get students on a relative same track, I think parents being accountable and knowing that they will be held to a standard might improve at least some of them. Does anybody have any other ideas on keeping people accountable in the school system? How well do you think this new report card will go over? I cannot find the link to the Today Show website that has the information on the report card at this moment. I will keep looking and hope to post it soon.

Foot: Little Brother and Interesting Article

While I'm enjoying the book, I'm quite overwhelmed with the technology and how Marcus is doing everything. I get caught up on what he is doing and the process in which he's doing it that sometimes after a page I just sit there and wonder. Maybe Doctorow doesn't need to go into such detail about the process of how Marcus switches the Fast Track, posts on the XNet, or makes keys for it. He says, "First, you encrypt it with your private key. You could just send that message along, and it would work pretty well, since they would know when the message arrived that it came from you. How? Because if they can decrypt it with your public key, it can only have been encrypted with your private key" (Doctorow 151). To some that might make perfect sense, but although I can kind have understand it, I get lost at the end. I'm not a very technological person and all of this "techy" talk confuses me. Perhaps if I understood what he was doing then I would enjoy it more. It just so happens that my own computer started acting a little weird after reading this book. What a coincidence because I started to freak out and each time I read a little more of the book, I would dream about something like it happening in my real life. Although, I'm pretty sure I would never get away with getting kidnapped and my parents never finding out. Where is Darryl and why isn't everyone looking for him? If I was his friend and knew the actual situation, I wouldn't lie but would tell the truth so maybe there would be a chance of finding him. Again, this is a fiction book and I guess that's why those situations pan out the way they do.

Recently, while watching the playoff games I kept seeing the same commercial over and over. I was getting rather annoyed because I pretty much could say half of the lines with the man narrating and didn't know exactly what they were talking about. Instead of looking up what this new Watson thing was, I ignored it and hoped for the commercial never to come back on. Searching through some websites yesterday, I stumbled upon an article on Watson (find January 20). This time I decided I would read what it said. Watson is actually a computer on Jeopardy that answers questions. It uses vagaries of languages to come up with the correct answer. Vagaries of languages is how the question is interpreted in a multitude of ways. The computer then has to decide which way seems to be the best and posts its answer. It seems like a rather lengthy process, but it does it in a few seconds. I was surprised to see that it answered the first few questions correctly in a matter of mere seconds. You can even watch the computer think and based upon if it is confident enough, you will see either orange or blue circles connecting on its screen.