A few different thoughts…

First off, I know I’ve been raving about English Companion Ning a lot, but I just want to say thanks to Diane for mentioning the Teaching Texts group on that ning. I had not noticed that group before, but what a useful opportunity. After reading Diane’s blog I immediately joined the group and made a post asking for help with One Flew Over A Cuckoo’s Nest, the book I have chosen to plan my unit around. Within the hour I received a response from a teacher who directed me to the personal website she created to teach this novel. Awesome!! The best part of this was that when I looked at some of the things she has done with the novel, I realized that some of my own ideas are not completely off the wall.

In my last post I mentioned some of my experiences with college student writing in Kalliope, and I was glad to see that Rae could corroborate my claim that the writing is often not on the level one might expect. Jason asked for some more specific examples. I am hesitant to put passages of the stories into my blog because they are anonymous submissions and I would hate to unintentionally offend a classmate (although I am sure that as English Ed majors we have all honed our writering skills), but I can elaborate on the things I see. Tense and agreement issues, misspellings and grammatical errors, overuse of adjectives and misuse of vocabulary. Sometimes it seems as though a writer has heavily relied on the “synonyms” function in Word to try to elevate his or her vocabulary without actually paying attention to context and meaning. As I say this, I fully realize that I make these mistakes all the time. However, over the years I have become very careful about my writing, and I try to be diligent with my editing – I wish that everyone would do this. Actually just today one of my professors, who has written several books and refers to himself as a professional writer, told our class that usually when he writes his first couple of drafts are crap, and it is not until he has gone through a tedious revision process that he is able to create high-quality material. Everyone makes mistakes at first, what matters is taking the time to go back and fix them.

I’ve been reading the chapters in Wilhelm’s “You Gotta Be The Book” this evening, and I am interested to discuss these chapters tomorrow, because I am currently a little confused. When he is discussing using cut-outs in SRIs, I’m picture the students doing puppet plays with magazine clippings and tortillas and I’m not convinced (as well as really hoping) that this is not what is actually going on. I guess I need a little clarification. However, I do think the idea of thinking about how you read, rather than just what you are reading, is an interesting one. I can’t say I’ve ever really thought about how I read before, but next time I sit down with a book (probably the Aeneid as soon as I finish this blog post) I’m going to try it.

Responses Galore!

I’m really excited because after posting a question on English Companion Ning last week I received a ton of responses. I asked, “I am a student at Penn State University studying Secondary Education English. As a high school student, I remember sometimes finding the literature in my curriculum hard to relate to, because it was often written and set in an era long before my time, and the characters led very different lives than my own. As a teacher, I hope to be able to help my students find connections between the literature I teach them and their own lives. Any tips for making the classic canon literature relevant to today’s high-schooler?” While I knew from the start that this question was a little on the vague side, as different books hold different appeals, I still received a lot of interesting and helpful responses. I think its great that so many educators are genuinely interested in helping each other out. One responder actually recommended the book we are reading in class, Wilhelm’s “You Gotta  Be the Book”, although someone else did knock the book for being too “syrupy and preachy”. I guess I’ll have to make my own call on that one. Either way, its great to know that this ning is a resource I will be able to count on during my career! Also, it has been useful in finding answers to the questions we have posed on the Reading Wiki.

I am on the fiction staff for Kalliope, a literary magazine at Penn State. This position requires me to read  A TON of student writing, as my job is to read all of the ficition submissions to the magazine and then along with my staff narrow the mass down to a small number of works which will be published in the magazine. Reading all of these submissions has reinforced my belief that there needs to be greater focus on writing instruction in schools. Although some of the stories submitted are really great, I am consistently disappointed by the poor writing skills displayed. Grammatical and spelling errors run rampant in the submissions, which are supposed to be in final draft form ready for publication, and sometimes even though I can see a glimmer of a good story, I can’t give it a “yes” vote because the writing is too weak to successfully convey the intended ideas. If college-level writers are suffering from these problems, there must be a block of some sorts occuring earlier in their educational careers. I hope that at least for my own students, I will be able to break down this block so that their writing skills will rise above the rest.

2/9/10

So my week has been hectic, and my blog has been slightly neglected. My apologies. Not too much news in my PLN world. I was excited to add my friend Katie’s blog to my Google Reader this week, as she just left for a semester abroad in Jordan! Reading her blog seems like a much more effective way of learning how her trip is going than counting on the occasional times when we might get to chat for a few minutes!

I also posted by first question on the English Companion Ning, about helping students make the texts they read relevant to their own lives. I am amazed at how quickly I received responses. As I said in a previous post, I think Nings might be my favorite of the tools I have recently learned about.

Twitter continues to befuddle me. I have still only made one tweet, which is merely an announcement of my first tweet. Everytime I log on to say something new, I draw a blank. I really don’t understand they why behind Twitter.

In other news, I just finished reading some of Smagorinsky’s book, and I have to say I completely agree with what he says in Chapter Five about considering and emphasizing the social purposes of conventional writing. Just as I do not wish to use Twitter because in my mind it lacks a reason why, students will not want to provide examples to support their claims if they do not understand why they should do this. Students need to be shown that their writing has meaning and purpose for society, and that the conventional rules they are required to follow have meaningful reasons behind them. Furthermore, Smagorinsky makes an important point about unconventional writing assignments when he says that “while seldom assessed in schools, they are every bit as legitimate in terms of how people think, act, communicate, and represent meaning throughout society.” Isn’t the point of education to teach students skills that will help them be productive members of society? In many ways I could see these unconventional assignments being more viable in the real world than any five paragraph essay, so if our goal is preparing students for life, why are these assignments considered unconventional? Perhaps it is necessary to rethink the sorts of assignments that are the cornerstone of English education.

Nings and Such

I’ve become very interested in the concept of the English Companion Ning. This network really takes the idea of community within the profession to a whole new level. I really think that its awesome. I was browsing through the site looking for some answers to the questions my group posed on our wikispace about reading, and while I didn’t end up immediately finding direct answers to those specific questions, what I did find was a vast network of resources to answer almost any question about teaching English. The idea that teachers from all over the place, who will probably never actually meet eachother face to face, can take the time to help eachother and share their knowledge and experience. I think that this is definitely a resource that I will want to continue to take advantage of, especially in my first couple years of teaching when I am just figuring things out.

Wikis: My new friend, maybe?

So the idea of wikis has been mystifying to me for a while…all I really knew about them was that Wikipedia is not an acceptable source for academic research. But today in class we watched a nifty little video about them, and I think they might actually be useful in my real life. In fact, I wish I would have learned about wikis two weeks ago, because I think that using a wiki would have been a much more effective way for me to handle compiling an order of THON t-shirts for the crew team, as opposed to getting an overwhelming number of emails about each person’s size. I’ll remember this lesson for next time…

However, all good things have downsides, and the down side of wikispaces is that apparently it sometimes deletes all of your work for no obvious reason, as my group learned towards the end of class today. Major bummer. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see if this becomes an unfortunate habit…

Another day of PLN-ing

I just created my twitter account.  My new name is ach89. I have yet to understand why Twitter is a good idea that millions of people have bought into. After creating my account, Twitter asked me to choose who else’s tweets I would like to follow, and then find some friends. As of right now, I am a friendless loner on Twitter, but since all of us in LL ED 420 are creating accounts, that will hopefully change soon. As to the question of who to follow, I was really at a loss. Some days I feel like my own life is more than enough for me to “follow”. I have realized that perhaps the biggest challenge I have to meet in the process of creating this PLN is going to be finding a way to handle the enormous amounts of information available and narrow it down to the small amount that is actually useful to me.

Well, I’m off to figure out how to get this blog validated.

Hello world!

So it is my very first day creating a PLN, and I have spent the past few hours looking at and enrolling in blogs, RSS readers, nings, social bookmarking sites, etc. I am admittedly not web-savvy, so these have been a confusing couple of hours, but I am now a user of not only WordPress, but also Google Reader and Delicious, and I have enrolled in the English Companion Ning. I’m still trying to figure out how to pull all of these things together, but thats another adventure for another day.