[FOOT] Naruto/Pinocchio Comparison

Text and Dialogue

Balloons
Pinnocchio - round speech bubbles.
Naruto - round most of the time. When trying to convey extra emotion, the bubble becomes jagged.

Caption
Pinocchio - used during narration
Naruto - The only time is during chapter changes

Emanata
Pinocchio - When jumping
Naruto - Used to show motion or when there is magic being used. Also used to express distinct emotions.

Labels/Signs
Pinocchio - Used for locations
Naruto - Used for locations ("The Ninja Academy" I recall)

Lettering
Pinocchio - same font throughout. bold/italics for particular emphasis.
Naruto - same font throughout. bold/italics for particular emphasis.

Sound Effects
Pinocchio - Very few in comparison to Naruto, but same general concepts used like "pow!"
Naruto - Lots. It's a very emotional text, so it's used quite liberally.

Visual Effects

Characters
Pinocchio - Not very detailed. It goes along with the art style. The eyes are very blank.
Naruto - Like everything else in its design, it's intricate.

Objects
Pinocchio - focus on just a few throughout mainly
Naruto - Very detailed like the scenery and are very plentiful.

Icons
Pinocchio - His nose!
Naruto - The headband

Scenery
Pinocchio - Dark and dreary, but because most of the focus is on the characters, there's little to absorb about it.
Naruto - A lot of scenery with the longer shots to show you it. Brings in a different element.

Depicted Action
Pinocchio - Lots of dying
Naruto - Lots of fighting

Layout and Design

Borders
Pinocchio - clearly defined
Naruto - clearly defined

Gutters
Pinocchio - varies
Naruto - always present

Panels
Pinocchio - Rectangular, stay in panels
Naruto - Rectangular, sometimes stay outside

Open Panels
Pinocchio - Like bleed down below, not much at all
Naruto - Like bleed down below, mainly just for text

Splash
Pinocchio - During heavy action
Naruto - showed up a lot during fight scenes

Angles and Frames

Bleeds
Pinocchio - Don't recall much, if anything. Stayed in their own panels.
Naruto - text bleed

Close-up
Pinocchio - during action sequences, they showed how intense something could be
Naruto - for very detailed emotional value

Headshot
Pinocchio - used for emotions
Naruto - used more for emotions

Head-shoulder shot
Pinocchio - conversation shots
Naruto - more detailed facial features during conversations

Full-figure shot
Pinocchio - when doing more than just speaking
Naruto - when doing more than just speaking

Long shot
Pinocchio - During action
Naruto - During action

Extreme long shot
Pinocchio - none
Naruto - Certain settings used a really long shot to show you the whole scenary

Reverse
Pinocchio - Used for dialogue
Naruto - Used for dialogue

Rhetorical Techniques Applied in Texts, Visuals, and Design

Exaggeration
Pinocchio - none/little
Naruto - A lot is used to convey all of the action and emotion in each scene.

Empathy/Identification
Pinocchio - Didn't really empathize at all.
Naruto - The "loser becoming strong" is fairly relatable and good for the YA crowd.

Mood/Tone
Pinocchio - The dark colors add most of the tone of the novel.
Naruto - Dialogue creates most of the mood.

Simplicity/Complexity
Pinocchio - Fairly linear, basic plot line structures and character development.
Naruto - It's hard to judge because so much of the complexity to me came from its design structure. I think if I was used to that style, the plot, etc. wouldn't be too complex in its presentation.

Irony/Satire
Pinocchio - Not very much, but ironic when Pinocchio kills his father with his nose.
Naruto - Didn't note much of it, other than in casual conversation that I can't pinpoint. Regular banter type things. A bit ironic that the loser ends up being the strongest, I suppose.

Realism/Icons/Symbolism
Pinocchio - Looks like a fantasy world
Naruto - More realistic in its depictions of the world around us.

Order/disorder
Pinocchio - It is very orderly in its design set up.
Naruto - The backwards thing would be easy if I had done it more often. Hard to follow only because of not being familiar with its style.

Juxtaposition
Pinocchio - Good vs. evil
Naruto - Good vs. Evil

Relationships
Pinocchio - There are only a few total. Pinocchio is fighting for those that he lost
Naruto - Has to prove himself and has a group he is training with and his teacher.

Point of View
Pinocchio - From Pinnocchio's POV almost entirely.
Naruto - Many throughout

As a whole, I really enjoyed having the opportunity to take some time on graphic novels, which I don't ever read. I do question how easily putting something like Naruto would be, though. Manga is an extremely touchy subject for readers. Almost every student knows what it is, and it's either loved or hated for its social connotations. I think it would be an interesting learning experience for those students who (most likely) blindly hate it because of the stereotype of kids who do read it, and a chance for those who do to share their knowledge on the subject. There is also a lot of artistic value beyond the words, which helps students delve into more complex ways of setting up a narrative and create the same atmosphere but with more tools than just words. I hope to have the opportunity to implement a graphic novel at some point.

[FOOT] Final Reflection

Being the only person who I think will speak their mind honestly in this post instead of mindlessly telling you how much I learned from this class, I regret to spend most of the following paragraphs in negativity. I didn't get much out of this class at all. Not due to my lack of preparation or due to Professor Foot. I felt on both ends that we, myself as a student and professor Foot as a teacher, put in the needed effort. I found the relationships I built with my peers and my professor were actually the best and most rewarding part of it. The class was faulted from its very beginning. Each assignment was plagued with misunderstandings of modern communication and technology and each lesson failed to actually grasp any new concepts with any sort of depth.

Starting right here, at the blogs. What is this? This is a blog. Well, sort of. This is actually just a set of reflective essays disguised as a blog. The premise of this assignment included trying to be a part of "the blogosphere." These blogs are filled with nothing except responses to classroom assignments. I do not qualify that as being a part of "the blogosphere." It's just doing homework in blogger instead of Microsoft Word. The blogosphere includes the entire internet and is about finding a niche category to share likeminded opinions and information with. Sharing our reflections on classroom assignments with the other students is just online classroom discussion -- not the blogosphere. As a writer and a blogger in my personal life, this entire set of assignments has failed in grasping the concept of real life blogging at all. Responding to a set of articles about technology on a blog is no different (or any more multi-modal) than typing up a response paper. And hell, the response paper may have actually had some critical depth to it. Instead, we all look for a few key points and hope you think there is something worthwhile in our 3-4 paragraphs that we don't even remember writing 2 weeks later. The only thing I find useful in this assignment is that a lot of other students may not have used Blogger before, so understanding the interface here online may be important to actually using it in the future. These are reflections -- not blogs.

We were told to set up facebook and twitter accounts. Starting with the latter for brevity, the twitter accounts we created were never even used. Why was our time wasted with this then? It confused me. I use mine because I really love twitter and have a personal account I use many, many times per day. The rest of the semester, I heard time and time again that my peers did not like twitter or were "confused" or any other number of random and minimal excuses to not utilize it. Facebook? 100x worse. The entire Facebook assignment completely misrepresented internet culture. From its very core, the assignment did nothing for us, or for the students we were working with. The reason people love Facebook is because its where their friends are and they have history there with their updates and photos, etc. etc. It's their own personalized timeline and they interact their constantly. This assignment forced both us, and our cooperating students, to have a DIFFERENT facebook account. This is where things go south. What this entails is having a completely separate, EMPTY profile with almost no friends and 0 status updates/personal history there to use for a SCHOOL assignment. You could tell by student's responses that they were uninterested and just forcing out their responses. I almost felt bad. There is no reason to spend time on this separate account because there is nothing there. Students (and all other teens) spend so much time on facebook because it is interactive and filled with their friends and other things that intrigue them. By creating a separate account, it becomes contrived and uninteresting. The assignment didn't take into account the WHY behind Facebook and, in turn, failed at actually achieving anything worthwhile.

There is a very distinct difference between using technology and multi-modalities in the classroom because they actually benefit the activity and forcing it onto students to make it look like you're utilizing the 21st century. Technology is still in its infancy and the internet is still the largest sociological experiment in anarchism that is still playing out. These sorts of activities aren't helping students take things to a farther level of thought. Blogs and Facebook give them, and us, a reason to give lackluster responses and half-hearted thoughts because it's not viewed the same way as a paper. Technology can be used in a way to force students to take things to a new level, but this class demonstrated exactly how it can be used a crutch instead. Without formalized critical thought on a lot of the work we did, the retention will be minimal and the interest in coming back even less. When taking the time to actually dig into a text and write about it is replaced with "put up a blog post about it," you don't get very detailed, analytical thought with real criticism in it. You get an ungrounded opinion piece that doesn't force the student to expand their mind. These posts included. What did we add to each other's lives from these blogs? If you think we all hung out on each other's blogs every day, you are sadly mistaken. We got in, did what we had to do to get our points, and got out.

Now, for a few sentences of positivity: We did a section on film that was wonderful. Sadly short, but extremely informative. The book we used on using film in the classroom was detailed and gave great tips on film theory and showed how to analyze a variety of popular films from several decades. This truly showed an informative and constructive way to use something multi-modal in the classroom and I plan to hold onto this book (along with all my other education books) and use it as I enter the classroom.

I may be making extremely broad strokes in this post, and I don't mean to speak for everyone in INLA in this post, but as a group, we have all expressed our concern and the daunting task of most of the assignments (and their worthlessness) all semester. If no one stands by my side in this, that's fine. I'll know that my conscience is clear and that I spoke my mind because I care about myself as a future educator as well as my peers and the next year and the next year, etc. etc. as well. All in all, I am completely disappointed in the class on multi-modality. It is fundamentally flawed and not just needs to be tinkered with, but completely reworked.

Professor Foot, you were wonderful, and you did your best. I thank you for being so understanding and helpful to all of us this semester. I truly wish I would have taken more from your class, but I also am not willing to sit idly by just so I receive my points. If this reflection means you have to fail my blog or me from the class, I am willing to take that stand. But I am not willing to compromise my beliefs on education or to hide my emotions when I feel my time was wasted. Thanks for reading this.

[FOOT] Extra Post 2: A Response to "Missing Culture"

On April 18th, a piece was written for NPR titled "The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything." It chronicles the math of the fact that with so much art (in all varieties out there), we will never be able to consume a very small fraction of it in our entire life. A bit depressing, and while I agree with its ending point of being "well-read" not meaning reading everything, but rather putting in a genuine effort of consuming a plethora of great art throughout your life, I think it misses a crucial point: other people and their role in your "well-read"-ness.

While I will not frivolously belabor some ignorant point that somehow having others in your life will ever make you as intelligent on a piece of work as much as actually indulging in it, I believe there is something to be said about understanding the broader, universal concepts that are presented and how that is much more of a discussion point than the name of a random character. What I mean by this is that, in short, you don't always have to have read a piece of work to hold your own in a conversation on a piece of literature/music/art/etc. As I stated, yes, actually indulging in the piece will give you a better picture of the exact piece, but this does not make it impossible to be able to understand conversation on the piece with a little research.

This is where human communication comes into play. I can connect to a piece of culture through others' understanding of it. I may not have seen the movie or read the book, but I can have it described to me and hear things through others' lenses and then create my own. You can still absorb so much more culture than can be read and seen just on our own. It's part of the human connection and being a part of a society. It's broadening our horizons through others.

This is not to undermine the task of actually partaking yourself, for no experience could outweigh that, but it's also a balance of finding what is important to you while also trying to expand through others and finding an even plane between the two.

[FOOT] Extra Post 1: A [brief] Musical History of Matthew Colwell

As an important staple in my life, I thought spending a few paragraphs chronicling some of the most important bands and records in my life would be worthwhile. As texts in their own right, these songs and albums have shaped me into the person I am today. From as long as I can remember, I found solace in music and literature, and they always helped me better understand myself and the world around me. I wouldn't trade these memories for anything.

My desire to listen to music didn't really start until I was 13. Up to then, I was just listening to boy bands and AC/DC, who my father listened to. But then I went to middle school and everything was revolutionized. While there are a number of records that hit me very quickly in 7th grade, I tend to think it was Box Car Racer's self-titled record that was the first punk rock record I got into. It's a band that features two of the members of pop-punk group Blink-182. They only released that album, but I still listen to it to this day. The rest of middle school was spent delving into old school hardcore records and also getting into different pop-punk acts.

After Box Car Racer, I fell in love with bands like Black Flag and Minor Threat. The song "Rise Above" by the former was a punk rock anthem to live by at that age. They may have been bands from the '80s, but I loved them. They embodied who I was (and still am to a point). It wasn't until a few years later that I read up on that entire scene, but there is a really great book that chronicles this era of music called American Hardcore: A Tribal History by Steven Blush. It recounts from '80-'86 and interviews every huge band from that scene and has great pictures and interviews with them. I've never seen another music scene documented so well. I was also getting into New Found Glory's record Sticks and Stones and listening to Blink-182 like it was my job. In 8th grade, Blink-182's self-titled record came out, and it was one of the first albums I remember lusting after to have ON release date. The last record I remember getting into was during 8th grade, I fell in love with Fall Out Boy's Take This To Your Grave (which turned out to be, sadly, their last great record as they expanded their sound and sold out to the pre-teen audience as they continued to blow up in the public music scene). As middle school came to a close, I had absorbed almost all the hardcore I could take, so high school would take quite the turn for me.

My freshman and sophomore year of high school were mostly spent listening to ska acts like Reel Big Fish and Streetlight Manifesto. I ended up fronting a punk/ska act we called The Underachievers for ~8 months before we broke up. Some of the best times of my life were in that band. Near the end of sophomore year I would start to become good friends with my now best

friend Chris Duxbury, who is a huge metal head. I started to listen to Shadows Fall and Dream Theater a little bit -- albeit I never did end up REALLY into metal, but I came to appreciate it and still like some of those bands. I continued to listen to the records I listened to in middle school and would eventually move onto a now favorite of mine, Dance Gavin Dance during my senior year of high school. The rest is sort of a blur at this point, but I spent most of my senior year listening to that band's record Downtown Battle Mountain and revisiting a lot of '90s emo acts like The Promise Ring and Christie Front Drive. But high school was really only the beginning of my musical journey, because college has completely revolutionized it.

My entire freshman year I was unemployed. Which, as a side note, was miserable. Because of this, the winter of 2008, I opened a blog focusing on music reviews. Over the next year, the blog would blow up into thousands of hits per day and meeting so many people with similar mindsets and crazy palettes of music taste. It's hard to comprehend all the music I listened to that year while I had so much time to and how many bands I've run into since then. Particularly, I fell in love with Minus The Bear, who, to this day, are still my favorite band and there isn't as song by them I don't like to jam to. I started listening to anything I could get my hands on and I finally had people to talk to about it because of the internet. My iTunes exploded and it's really all history since then. I listen to a little bit of everything except for older music of any sort. I never could get into classic rock or metal.

But not only have I just passively listened to these bands and somehow had them influence me. From the musicianship to the lyrics, they have treated me the same way as books have and I hope to integrate music into my classroom when I begin to teach. So much music is influenced by literature and I am certain there will be ways to integrate it into the classroom. I look forward to keeping up with modern music in a way that will help me relate to students and utilize it so they can reach new levels of critical thought and then apply it to their tests and the literature assigned and fall in love with words in the same way they may love movies or music.

[PYTASH] Final Reflection

I have found that this semester's course has had a solid impact on my teaching abilities and experiences and outlook on the profession. Starting with the Firestone experience and then including the canonical wiki and lesson presentation, all three of these have in some way molded me in a new way. Then lay on top of that our work with teaching different lenses, and they couple together to reenforce new teaching abilities and strategies. However, I have felt that most of the semester felt very disconnected. Whether this was at my fault as the student or a combination of other factors, the class felt very unfocused or solidified at times in an overall sense.

Compared to last semester, our time at Firestone was much more well spent and productive. I really felt like I made a difference in a student's life and that I helped my student prepare for the OGTs. I was able to work on my ability to teach in a one-on-one atmosphere and still have support from my peers and teachers if I needed assistance in trying to get a point across to help them understand something better.

The lesson presentation was also a huge builder for this. Being the closest to a full class lesson I've taught, it may not have been the most serious activity we've done, but it helped me to learn to gauge time and student reaction, even if they were my peers. While the experience will be different with a group of high schoolers, the same concepts will be applied, just adjusted.

The canonical wiki felt the most useless assignment we've done (and still sort of does) until I realized exactly what had happened when it was done: I had 20 links to pre, during, and post reading activities for two handfuls worth of canonical texts. BOOKMARKED. I could walk into a classroom and be able to teach an entire unit on these books with all these resources now. It as boring and felt dumb, but it will come in handy in the future.

As for my feeling on the disjointedness, I feel a lot of it stems from the class being once per week. While we covered a solid amount of material and it DID connect, it didn't seem to feel like it from week to week. I would often forget what we had discussed the week before and it seemed to jump around a lot. It all came together as we continued on, but I continually felt like there was no direction (in this class and especially in Multi-Modal). There was a lot of valuable content that I feel we spent time discussing, which is always good and I thoroughly enjoy, but didn't spend testing and memorizing and having concrete details about. All the lens work we did? We have a few sheets on each one, but not much material we can hold onto for the future besides the knowledge we already have.

All in all, I'm always happy with your course, Pytash. You've taught me a great deal and I couldn't be happier. I know I'll take these materials and the knowledge you've instilled in me into my future classroom, and I don't know where I'd be without your support and care as a teacher.

[PYTASH] Chapter 7

In her lesson on Julius Caesar in conjunction with test preparation, she makes a good point on pg. 157 about multiple choice practice. She states:

"I would never waste valuable preparation time writing multiple-choice questions, compiling character identification lists, or composing true/false questions for an assessment of our classroom literature. You can find such items for almost any classic on the internet or in published study guides. Moreover students will invariably point out how my homemade multiple-choice questions are vaguely expressed and defend their incorrect answers with reason. I give up."

She recognizes the futility that comes along with this type of rote testing. By instead focusing on developing their critical thinking skills, she shows that the ability to answer the multiple choice questions will come along with it.

I think ending our blogs about using classics in the classroom with this quote is more than appropriate: "Playing games with the classics accomplishes nothing."

[PYTASH] Chapter 6

This is it. This is the chapter I needed in this book. How to design a lesson. This was full of really awesome information. The 8 steps were a great way to break down how to set up a successful lesson plan and meet everything we need to as teachers and hopefully keep kids interesting. Teaching isn't mathematical and sterile, but there needs to be some real structure and a "right" way of doing (in an amorphous kind of way, but "right" nonetheless).

A lot of the figures/handouts she showed may have only been applicable to The Odyssey, but their form and purpose in the lesson could be used anywhere, especially with classic literature. Seeing her actually apply the last 5 chapters felt great.