Foot: "Publish or Perish" and "I (heart) Novels"

“Publish or Perish”

I really enjoyed this article. I find it interesting how electronic book readers have become so popular lately. Personally, I don’t like electronic books. I find it hard for me to read off of a screen. It gives me a headache. I do recognize that there are a lot of positive features to electronic books. They often are very cheap and you have to book as soon as you buy it. For me, the instant access to the books is the best perk for electronic readers. I didn’t realize that there was such a scandal around the price of electronic books. I thought it was interesting to read about the war between the publishers and Amazon. As I was reading this article, I was wondering if textbooks would be offered as electronic books as well. I wonder how they would be priced in relation to new and used textbooks. I think once people have more access to electronic readers and iPads, then they can become a valuable asset to reading and learning in English classrooms. Students will have more access to books instantly and that is never a bad thing.




“Letter from Japan: I <3 Novels”

I thought this was an interesting article. I have never heard of cell phone writers before. It’s really interesting how the Japanese culture has impacted their use of the internet. I thought it was neat how the people reading the cell phone novels online were able to critique and offer feedback to the author.
I think it’s interesting that the cell phone novels are actually being published. I was really surprised when the article talked about authors not wanting to reveal their identity. It’s very different from American customs where we want to take credit for our work.

I think it’s really interesting how the internet and cell phones has drastically impacted our culture. I think this concept would be neat to incorporate in a creative writing class. I think it would be interesting to see how students respond to being able to write stories through their cell phones.

Foot: Video Games in the Classroom

I thought this article brought up a lot of interesting points although I don’t know that I agree with all of them. I liked that the article talked about a school that was trying to use technology to help students learn; however, I’m not really a fan of using video games in classrooms. In my College Writing class, I had to write papers on video games after I had played them. I actually hated the fact that I was forced to play video games for a class. I don’t like playing video games to begin with so this approach to learning didn’t appeal to me at all. I felt like my teacher was trying to incorporate “cool” things into the class. I do think this approach to learning could benefit a student who likes video games. If you had a student in your class who liked videogames, then I think the use of videogames could help the student become more interested in the class. I think a teacher needs to know who his or her students are in order to see if this type of approach would work.

Foot: Make-up Assignment

As a teacher, I think the multigenre autobiography would be a fun way to learn more about your students. The multigenre autobiography offers teachers a way to find out what types of topics your students are interested in. Knowing what your students are interested in would be very beneficial when trying to decide how to organize students for group projects. The multigenre autobiography lets teachers to have a better sense of who their students are and what type of background the students comes from. It also lets students learn more about each other. They may find that they have similar interests to one another. One of the lessons that I learned from completing my own multigenre autobiography was that even though I recognized that a text was too difficult for me, I returned to that text a few years later. That lesson impacts the way I plan on teaching because it showed me that it’s important not to get discouraged just because you struggle with something. I also learned just how important books were in my life. I read young adult literature because I could relate to that characters and what they were feeling. That reminded me how important it was to remember what types of situations my students will be going through and the emotions that are associated with them. One of the challenges with the multigenre autobiography is that it requires a lot of knowledge about computers in order to incorporate media in the presentation.

Another activity I would use in my own classroom would be to have students analyze a short piece of film after already viewing it once. I think this activity would be great in a creative writing classroom because it makes the students focus on their senses and specific details in the movie. I especially liked when students had to close their eyes and write down all the sounds that they heard in the film clip. It would make students realize how important specific details are when a writer is trying to capture a specific moment. I think this activity would also work in a general English class. This activity helps students realize how details impact a piece of writing. One of the challenges with this assignment is that it requires some knowledge of films terminology. It also requires students to be completely focused on the film clip in order to fully grasp the exercise.

Foot: Pleasure Reading

I just recently stumbled on the television show The Vampire Diaries. After watching one episode, I decided to watch a few more episodes to see how it compared to the Twilight series. I wanted to read some of the books as well to see how they compared. I’ve read the first two books in the series: The Awakening and The Struggle. At first, I felt like the author was stealing a lot of the same ideas from the Twilight series, but as I got further into the books I realized that they are quite different. The television show adds a lot of sexual appeal whereas the books don’t incorporate that as much. I think it’s interesting how this vampire genre seems to dominate young adult literature right now. I really enjoy reading the Twilight series as well The Vampire Diaries. I plan on reading the rest of the books in The Vampire Diaries when I have time.

Pytash: Chapter 5

This chapter immediately caught my attention after reading the first two paragraphs. I loved the Jago mentioned how song lyrics are actually a type of poetry. I think students have a hard time connecting to poetry in general. By drawing attention to song lyrics as a form of poetry, it offers students a way to relate to poetry. I’m not really a huge fan of poetry, but I know it is important because I will be teaching it in a classroom. In this chapter, I really liked that the Think Aloud strategy was used with reading a poem for the first time. I think it is really important for pairs of students to use this strategy in order to make sense of a poem. Poetry is often ambiguous when you read through a poem for the first time. I think this strategy would really help students to become more comfortable with poetry because they can ask questions and discuss the poem in a small group. This chapter also talked about why teachers should teach how poems work and how to approach difficult poems. I think as teachers, we need to be cautious as to how we approach difficult poetry. I think that is where we can lose a lot of students because they feel like they don’t understand what is happening within the poem. I liked that the section on difficult poems gave options on how you can approach difficult poems.

Pytash: Chapter 3

Choosing Which Books To Read

I really liked this chapter because it was very informative about deciding what types of books students should read during school and how many. I really enjoy reading and so it is often hard for me to choose just one book to read. This chapter made me think about what kinds of books I want to teach in my classroom. Personally, I prefer to read books rather than short stories. I think books allow me to get to know the characters better. I was really surprised when Jago said that she had her sophomore students reading twenty books. When I think back to my sophomore year in high school, I know I didn’t read nearly as many books as that. I liked that she had her students reading outside of class for their choice project. I also liked that she paired the choice reading project with literature circles. I know a lot of times when students are reading difficult texts on their own outside of class, it really helps to have a space where students can come back together to ask questions and discuss the text. This section made me excited that I will be able to choose the books that I want my students to read. I don’t know that I’ll have my students reading twenty books in a school year, but I am going to have them reading a lot.

One quote stood out to me in the reading in the empathy section. It said, “Literature allows for close, almost scientific analysis of individuals under duress” (Jago 52). I really liked this quote because I think it captures why a lot of people like to read. For me, I like to read because I like to see how characters handle complex situations. Overall, I found this chapter to be hugely informational as to what I should include and not include in my classroom.

Pytash: Chapter 1

I really enjoyed this chapter. One thing that I found interesting was the section that dealt with reading for pleasure versus studying literature. As I was thinking about this chapter, I was questioning how to use classical literature to get students interested in reading. I think that both young adult literature and classical literature have different advantages to each, but I think young adult literature is more effective in getting students interested in reading. I think classical literature can teach students a lot about themselves and society, but I think it is hard getting students motivated up to that point. I was also surprised to learn that Oprah now has “Traveling with the Classics.” I think it is great that a celebrity figure such as Oprah is promoting classical literature.

I really liked the section that dealt with reading literature creating background knowledge. I really liked that Jago pointed out that you gain background knowledge on subjects just from reading. I had never thought about it that way before. Lately I have been reading articles online on the NASCAR website. I don’t really know that much about cars, but I have noticed that I’ve become more fluent with the vocabulary. I guess I just haven’t paid that much attention to how reading can create background knowledge rather than just obtaining background knowledge from my life experiences.