Posts

Narrative Writing

I never got the chance to write about Christensen’s work with Narrative writing and honestly, kind of missed out on that. Since this was the first chapter of Christensen that we actually read together, I felt like it was a really powerful chapter to start us off on. Whenever I have heard anything about meeting standards or anything like that, I have never thought of teachers using narrative writing as a means to reach those standards, and I don’t think Christensen had that in mind as she was teaching her students, I think it was more about making sure her students learned empathy and that their writing was meaningful. They had an audience in their classroom and learned that their writing could make others relate to them and feel like their world was not so isolated. The idea of actually getting students to share such personal moments in their writing is definitely something I want to explore in my classroom. Although, some of Christensen’s idea did give me a bit of anxiety, e
Post a Comment
Read more

Essays

Again, Christensen really blew me away with another chapter in her book Teaching for Joy and Justice because I just find myself amazed by the awesome ways that she is able to really dive into teaching writing. Growing up, I always used the same formulaic writing that Christensen talks about with her students: Five paragraphs, intro, three bodies of evidence, and then the conclusion. Plain and simple and to the point with everything I ever wrote for school. I felt like if I tried to break out of this formula, I would get a failing grade because I wrote too much or I wasn’t being concise enough for my teachers. That’s probably why I never kept any of my papers from high school or ever felt like they had any meaning to them. It wasn’t until I hit college when I really started to understand that this “formula” had given me a base to work off of. I needed to get my reader’s attention with the intro, I needed to provide evidence even if it was more than just three paragraphs, and I needed to
1 comment
Read more

Poetry

Image
Poetry has never really been my favorite part of studying English and taking ELA classes. None of my teachers even remotely seemed like they were interested in poetry in the slightest, making most of the lessons seem like it was more obligation to the curriculum more than anyone actually enjoying poetry with their students. The only time I ever had a teacher actually care about poetry was when I knew that they had actually participated in poetry slams and wrote spoken word poems to share with their class. Granted, it was for a creative writing class, but we spent an entire month just on poetry and during that month, I tried really hard to think of poetry as more than just a bunch of choppy little sentences, but it was hard when my entire history had painted them as such. In the past few years, programs like Button Poetry have really made me appreciate poetry as an art and really made me see it as more than just Shakespeare’s sonnets or e.e. cummings lowercase spellings. A
Post a Comment
Read more

#RIWP18

I’ve been going to the Rhode Island Writing Project since I was sixteen years old (only missing one because I could not get the day off from work). I have presented at them, worked on helping create pamphlets, and overall, just being apart of the Writing Project culture for five years. This year, however, was a whole new experience for me. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was there to become an educator. I have known for a long time that I was going to be a teacher, but going to these conferences before was more of me going to talk to teachers about what their students need while I was a student. Now, it became my responsibility to listen, to become that educator who needed to listen about what student need now that I’m almost five years out of high school. Troy Hicks actually followed me back on Twitter which is really awesome because after we’ve spent the time reading his book and actually hearing him speak, I feel like he’s sort of a superhero in the educatio
1 comment
Read more

Standards

As you can probably guess from my lesson last week, using digital texts to read and write is extremely important to me. The idea of encouraging communication across generation and across culture through our writing is now at the tips of our fingertips for most of us. However, I am reminded of a quote from the first chapter of Hawley Turner and Hicks that read: “Crafting arguments in a digital world could be one of our greatest opportunities to improve dialogue across cultures and continents or it could contribute to creating or continuing bitter divides” (pg. 7) I won’t even go into how this quote could be applied to all of my distant relatives on Facebook who plan on posting any opinion they have ever had on my wall. I just wanna breaifly focus on the first half of the quote based on the standards we read about and chapters 2 and 3 of Hawley Turner and Hicks.   The only standards I have really been working with over the past year of my time in Education classes have been the middle
1 comment
Read more

Digital Literacy

I have been thinking a lot about the future of technology within the classroom, and going through these past few readings, its been something that’s been even more on my mind than ever before. Recently, everything revolving around the internet has been on my mind due to the never ending battle surrounding net neutrality that’s being held by the government, it makes me wonder what the future of digital literacy will really be. Listening to Danah Boyd discuss her own growth through the use of internet really makes me wonder about all of the ways that students might not have the same experience as access to the internet may become more limited. According to Boyd, the internet is where she found herself and where she created an online identity that allowed her to explore her sexual identity and create a community for herself. As we possibly lose access to the internet the way that school technology has begun to rely on it, does that mean that we are going to have make major adjustments in
2 comments
Read more

Cultural Pedagogy

I had recently learned about Kimberle Crenshaw and her work with intersectionality during the research I had done for an Honors Project I was conducting on intersectionality and social justice education. The article I had read by her was actually a piece written as a law document explaining the horrible abuse faced by women of color and the systemic factors involved in their lives that prevent them from getting the proper treatment that they deserve. Reading her words had been very empowering last semester, but actually hearing her speak sent chills down my spine, especially as she and the crowd named the women who had been killed in acts of police brutality within the past two years. Crenshaw at one point said, “i f we can’t see a problem, we can’t fix a problem” and that part really stuck with me. When talking about intersectionality, it’s interesting to see it as something that society kind of forgets about. For example, when Crenshaw was listing off the names of the men and wo
Post a Comment
Read more