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.

Foot: Internet Articles

Internet

It was quite comical that one of the guys didn't even want the credit for the Internet. He was like I didn't even do half of this but they're giving me credit. I did not know that the Arpanet was around in 1969. Of course, I wasn't alive then but still I didn't think that the Internet had it's first origins till around the eighties. Ray Tomlinson just so happened to choose the @ symbol to separate the person with the files on the computers. I'm sure no one thought it just happened by chance. Steve Case talked about community trumping content and I think that is still relevant today. No matter what you can learn on the Internet, I think more people like and want to be a part of it because of who they can connect to. I'm not a fan of Gary Thuerk; I hate spam. There is so much to the Internet that I never knew. I'm sure a lot of people just take it for granted. I use Yahoo everyday and never wondered who came up with or when. 

Facebook

What an accomplishment to have the world's sixth most visited site be owned by a twenty-four year old. I knew some of the controversy of Mark Zuckerberg's past before reading the article, but not as in depth as Rolling Stones told it. Whether he really did steal the idea of the site from his colleagues is something we will probably never know. While it may not seem fair, he is the one that went the furthest with the idea and prospered off of it. It seems to me like it was going to be thought of by someone at the school within time. Zuckerberg just happened to be the one that got all the kinks out of the way and mastered the idea. If I was one of his colleagues, I'm sure I would be angry. It's doesn't seem that he is a very people-oriented person. I wonder if all the people he has burned even use Facebook.