[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.

[PYTASH] Chapter 4

I hate that I feel like I'm complaining about the chapters this time around, but I really wasn't fond of this one, either. Not because what it's telling me isn't useful information, it's just very basic. The structure went like this:

Here's the elements.
Here they are applied in a story.
Here's the structures and devices.
Here they are in a story.

If this was a book of lesson plans, then yes, I am very grateful for what she had to say. It was a good refresher, but she could have just said "hey, teach this stuff. It's good for your kids" and been on her way to something with more depth that I really need to know more about.

Yes, students need to know these things, and that is a great starting point. I am thankful to be told and reminded that X, Y, and Z are good to be taught in the classroom. I just really want to know more about the HOW to teach them. I want more classroom examples and different lessons that have taught the elements and literary devices and how they went over and what could have gone better and more teacher input on this, etc. etc. Not the definitions of the literary devices and plot structures that I already knew.

[PYTASH] Chapter 2

Because I'm a book worm, I was excited coming into this chapter to see how Jago would go about getting students to learn new words. While I was pleased with her instructions and the general feel of the chapter, I still felt like it didn't address the core of the problem: students don't read. She sort of glosses over that point by saying empty phrases about how kids need to read more, but then doesn't actually address how to do this. I'm not saying I have an answer, but she doesn't either. They're not going to learn if they're not interested. It needs to be more than an assignment and it needs to feel like its part of their life to really affect them. She says this, which I really liked:

"The key learning that I try to achieve is that learning new words is a natural act. So much of what happens in schools seems artificial to students; a series of meaningless assignments that they perform for the teacher or else fail."" - pg. 27

I think that is really great. Making school and learning feel natural. But that phrase is empty. It doesn't show me how to do that. Maybe there isn't a way to just be like "here's how you make learning feel natural," but I think it's a key point missing from this book and any other education book I have read. It is one thing to say "learning should be natural" and a whole different thing to actually teach me how to do that.

I also think the entire chapter oversimplified language acquisition. Having taken linguistics where we discussed language acquisition, it's far more complex than that and learning new words isn't just "read and have them talk about the words they don't know." By high school age, we've already accumulated much of our vocabulary, it's just not that simple of a process. I think it gave a few solid exercises, but it just didn't have the depth I think we, as future educators, need at this point in our (pre)careers.

[FOOT] Firestone Experience

During my time at Firestone, I had a solid amount of work time with my student. Even though he had to leave after school was over, from 2:15 to 3:30, we got a lot accomplished each week. I'm actually really glad for the time because he was a super nice kid who was honestly trying to pass the OGT, and his effort to understand showed. I am confident he will do well on the OGT and that our time together had something to do with that.

As for multi-modality, it was a bit lacking in our actual use. In fact, it was completely absent beyond using the calculator on my phone to do a few math problems (before we switched back to English for the remainder of the time). Infusing multi-modality into test preparation is a bit more difficult than it sounds in my head. By nature, tests are not full of multi-modalities. It is a student and a piece of paper and a pencil. So, studying for something that doesn't have multi-modalities can be hard using them because they don't require them to exist. If I were to use multi-modal concepts while preparing for a test, I would use smart boards and non-traditional texts. However, I do find the use of traditional test preparation to still a more needed space in the classroom.

Because a lot of test studying in the classroom is not done on a one-on-one basis, the use of a SmartBoard could help keep things interactive and utilizing students to their full potential. Students could use it to answer questions or to visualize something in a text or keep track of things they know about a piece while they're reading. It would be like simulating the test and having the SmartBoard act as the scrap paper that everyone could see and collaborate on. It also helps hold students' attention because of it being technology oriented.

To pair with the technology of a SmartBoard, using non-traditional texts like graphic novels, manga, or a film can help bring a new thought process to the students and engage them in a way books don't. As long as the questions asked still aid in the test preparation, it will be a positive influence because of the way it keeps their interest and gets student out of the monotony of just reading test questions and answering. Bringing forth the same type of questions with different types of texts will also help them realize these same questions can be applied beyond just a book, so they may find the information more worthwhile.

However useful both of these may be, though, I still believe they are less worthwhile than using traditional test preparation. Just a simple google search of OGT Test Preparation Materials gives you a plethora of sites to use. The top link is even test materials released by the ODE. It comes from the root of standardization: you have to teach to the test. As much as we all wish knowledge was amorphous and that personal responsibility is enough, we need to make sure students are on some sort of track to a normal level of intellect. ANd because of this, we have to teach particular things in a particular way. And to go outside of that risks failing the only thing that matters: the test. Students aren't humans in this game; they're a test score. Welcome to standardization -- get used to it.

As for test preparation, tests, and the growing meaning of "literacy," I think it's more of a rebranding than an expanding definition. Built into new technologies are old. It's a pyramid. Without language (which is part of the "old" regime of literacy), computers don't matter beyond pictures. So, to have that second level of "new" literacy ("computing" etc.), you have to have the prior. The second level is dependent on the first. And, you can learn the first using the second. They are intertwined. But, I also don't see these new multi-modalities entering standardized testing anytime soon. Students aren't going to be tested on their knowledge of video games or ability to operate microsoft office by the government any time soon, if ever. And teachers are already so pressured to meet the current standards, they dont' have time to branch into the new literacies as much as they could because they need to make sure their students pass the current ones. It's really a never ending cycle.

I don't see multi-modal literacies merging into test preparation very easily or very commonly soon. Because it isn't tested, it isn't taught. There's no time for it. Students need to know what type of questions are coming at them and how to figure out the answer. Not how to use a SmartBoard or analyze a film in a similar way you would a book. We don't allow for this creativity to flow in the classroom when it comes to testing. The film won't help as much as a day spent doing traditional test prep, and teachers are aware of that. It may be boring, but I think students know that, too. While working with my student, even he was aware of it. He was focused and knew that this was going to help him pass, and that's why he was there. He didn't want to do anything super crazy interesting. He wanted to learn to take the test correctly and pass.

In the future, I see it integrating more, and as a future teacher, I hope to be a part of that wave. I think more technology become subsidized by the government and plateau's a bit for them to control and keep in check, it will be implemented and monitored in schools more. It will start to become a necessity for life (more than it is now) and forced into schools and literacy. However, I still remain skeptical as to how it will be used for/during test and test preparation and can only work towards finding a way to make it work in the future.

[FOOT] Pleasure Texts

I thought for my "pleasure reading" post, I would talk about a few albums I've been into lately since music is such an important part of my life and then talk about a concert I recently went to.

This is a band named The Motel Life. They released this record, Retreat, this past summer, and I really love it. It's about feeling defeated and getting through those circumstances. It uses a lot of really great metaphors and the musicianship is top notch and very consumable. It's an indie-rock record, but it's very catchy and calm. I highly recommend this band to just about anyone who even listens to music. Check out their tunes on bandcamp where the whole record is streaming.



This is a new song by a band I've been listening to since I was in middle school, Taking Back Sunday. They recently had a re-vamp of their line-up to the original members from their 2003 record Tell All Your Friends. This song is off their upcoming record that's supposed to be released this summer (June 28th, to be exact).



Also, I recently got to see my favorite band, Dance Gavin Dance, perform live last night (March 30th). They are a progressive post-hardcore band from California. What was special about this performance is that this tour (and their most recent record) had 5 of the 6 original members of the band, which they hadn't had since their 2007 debut full-length, Downtown Battle Mountain. I talked about this record during my powerpoint presentation earlier in the year. Anyhow, the performance was great and it was awesome to see one of my favorite bands with (most of) their original line-up. The opening bands who were on the tour weren't anything special to talk about, but the band I Wrestled A Bear Once played, and they're a very weird experimental grindcore act that I think is...well, an interesting listen, to say the least. It was a great time, and I love being at concerts. A band I was filling in for even opened the show, so I got to share the stage with one of my favorite bands last night. Here's their most famous song, "And I Told Them I Invented Times New Roman."

[FOOT] Film Festival Experience

Having spent some time at music festivals, I was interested to see how a film one would go. Seeing as films are presented a bit differently than films are, I was expecting it to be a lot different but still under the same "festival" ethos in its presentation. I was mainly correct, and I really enjoyed the experience.

Paying $12 for a ticket to a movie sucks real hard, but at least it was a good movie and the atmosphere was solid. I actually didn't order my ticket online like most of my classmates did, but I also wasn't super picky with what I wanted to go see. It's always nice to be downtown. As much as people rag on Cleveland, it could be worse -- we could be Detroit. I found the only thing that bothered me was that they didn't seat movies until 15 minutes before. It does make sense, though, because there are so many movies being shown and only so much room to play them all.

Will I go back? Probably not. I'm not really a film person. I like books and music, but I am just not a visually stimulated individual, so most movies bore me and I see no artistic or intelligent value in them. Maybe if a friend of mine drags me to one, but other than that, this was more than enough film festival experience for me. Good times, for sure.

[FOOT] Film Festival: The Children of Chabannes Review

Personal Issues: I'm a sucker for documentaries. I don't care much for regular films, but I really like documentaries because they're factual. I often find a lot of the more modern ones (think Michael Moore) to be a bit scare-tactic oriented if focused on political issues, but in general, I just love watching documentaries. I can't say I'm particularly interested in World War II, but I am always interested in a good story, and The Children of Chabannes was great. It was a very heartfelt and it bled with authenticity. I couldn't help but feel for those involved and how touching it was. It was a very realistic view of what was going on in that town.

Technique: The film was mainly comprised of interviews with different people -- very common for a documentary. It's not actors reading from a script, rather human beings telling their story. It wasn't filled with fancy CGI and Michael Bay-like explosions. It spent its time really telling a story about a real world event.

Acting: Because this is a documentary, the people in the film were not "actors" because they weren't acting anything out. They said what they felt and shared their knowledge on the situation at hand.

Plot: "A tale of courage, resilience and love set during WWII, The Children of Chabannes tells the story of how the people of Chabannes, a tiny village in unoccupied France, chose action over indifference and saved the lives of 400 Jewish refugee children. Filmmaker Lisa Gossels returns to Chabannes with her father and uncle, two of the 400 children who were saved. Through intimate interviews with her father and the other "children" of Chabannes, the filmmakers recreate the joys and fears of daily life in that village. We see how this oasis of hope is shattered in August of 1942, when the war reaches the doorsteps of the chateau where the children lived. Through accounts by the extraordinary teachers who taught and loved these children, this lyrical and moving film shows the remarkable efforts made by the citizens of Chabannes, who risked their lives and livelihoods to protect these children, simply because they felt it was the right thing to do." -www.childrenofchabannes.org.

Themes: Beyond the plot theme of saving Jews from Nazi Germany, The Children of Chabbanes really focuses on acceptance and harmony. It's a testament that people can have different views and lifestyles and be together and work together without need for violence. The man who saved all 400 of those Jewish children, Felix Chevrier, was the beacon of that lighthouse and really shows the compassion a human really can have. It was nothing less than touching and reenforces the ideals of solidarity.

Genre: Historial documentary/Jewish Film.

Representation: The film represents as factual of an account of an event as possible. By using interviews, it doesn't allow for a creator bias and isn't a work of fiction.

Ideology: I think this basically ties to the themes of the film. Because it's a documentary. It focuses on Jewish culture, so those ideologies are brought forth, along with the theme of solidarity and caring for your fellow human in times of war.

[FOOT] Quick Response to other articles

(You said you only wanted 2 posts on the articles, but here's my initial response to the two articles i didn't include in my other posts)

Video Games: Mildly absurd, but the heart is in the right place. Even if you just read the first page, having students direct a teacher in a video game doesn't actually teach them anything they can't learn in a gym class with coordination or on their own free time playing the video games themselves. There was no intellectual stimulation to win, it was just watching and going. Made me sad. I'm sure there is some worthwhileness to it that will be implemented in the future, but the current state of video games just doesn't allow for it.

Publish or Perish: Digital books are and will take over. Only time will prove this, but I agree with it. Because I'm a music nerd, I make this analogy: Vinyl culture is recently experiencing a large increase in sales. MP3s are still taking over, but there is now a niche culture for physical music. This same concept will apply to physical books in the future. The main sales will come from digital retailers while physical books become a niche market for those who love to hold onto books. Do you see major vinyl retailers? No, it's all small shops independtly owned. I see this same concept happening to physical books. At least fiction. Obviously textbooks will stick around for a lot longer until there is a way to subsidize it federally for the government to have all textbooks available on a Kindle or something similar.

[FOOT] I'm So Totally, Digitally Close To You/You're Leaving a Digital Trail

The first page of this article immediately struck a chord with me. It discussed the change from the very primitive Facebook layout, to the first one that included a News Feed, which is now a very accepted feature. Heck, the news feed is one of, if not the, most important features of what defines Facebook.

"What particularly enraged Parr was that there wasn’t any way to opt out of News Feed, to “go private” and have all your information kept quiet."

"Within days, the tide reversed. Students began e-mailing Zuckerberg to say that via News Feed they’d learned things they would never have otherwise discovered through random surfing around Facebook"

As a Facebook user for several years now, these two quotes correlate to every single time Facebook makes a change to its layout or privacy settings. There is an outburst for a few days or a few weeks, but eventually everyone shuts up. This is EVERY SINGLE TIME. No matter the situation, people don't pay enough attention and Facebook gets their way. Over the past several years, Facebook has continued to change their privacy settings to allow more of your information out, and people constantly ignore the changes and give their information away. This isn't new, and people don't seem to care.

Later on in the piece, it discusses a concept labeled as "ambient intimacy." It's a lingering, long lasting mark on the world that we can all view, all the time. We may not always be aware of it. The piece talks about how each little piece of information comes together over time to create a picture of who we are, yet we continue to let it be drawn for everyone to see. This is how we are judged now -- but the little snippets we leave behind. And we just continue to leave these bread crumbs behind us that people can openly follow. This leads to the next article/my next point.

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People. Don't. Care. This entire article proves it. The very first paragraphs are about kids completely willing to give up their privacy for a smart phone. Our own financial/materialistic desires are causing us to give up basic human rights and a better way of living.

I was actually quite depressed by how much this article focused on the positives. Yes, Google is doing great things and are worthy of praise. And data collection can do great things. But all of this data collection is done by private companies that, in reality, can do whatever they want with it. They say they don't/won't sell your data, but you would most likely not know if they did anyways, because they'll be doing business with someone else who doesn't want you to know they have your data. This is a political issue that needs to be addressed.

We are ignoring the fact that we don't have any privacy anymore because it's for our own societal gain and nothing else.

But, then I am posed with this question: Even if we "protect" the data, is it really all that safe? Ever? Even 5 years ago, data was being collected on us, and it's just becoming more widespread and open. So, no matter how we go about this, are we screwed anyways? Will we ever really have privacy ever again if we continue to have to have an ip address, a cell phone with gps in it, etc. etc.? I don't think so. But maybe I'm just a skeptic.

[FOOT] I (heart) Novels

I love technology. I really do. And while I love this article, and I think it's great people are writing, this is not literature. In any form. This is whiny a group of people with self-esteem issues writing their diaries in public and getting paid for it. Yes, it's real in every way, but people are also aware of that now, so they'll fluff up their own stories.

Sure, the first girls story is cool, Mone. It had a sense of authenticity to it. And it was admitted to be this stream of consciousness diary. Which it is. And that's it.

I understand the times are changing and writing will be done in different ways, but there is a difference between spilling your guts on your phone and writing a piece of literature. It's different mental processes. The former allows lax writing abilities to pass as worthwhile, when all it does is hinder language from its most complex intricacies that make literature so worthwhile in the first place. The latter forces the creative insides come out and to use language in a way that is interesting and forces people to view things differently.

Leave diaries in 13 year old's closets.

Cool Education Reform Video

Definitely worth your 11 minutes of time. Focuses on the problem of our factory-like education system and how it's outdated in its approach and the problems within the way we standardize and don't focus on application enough.

[Foot] Great Films Post: Film Theory and Censorship

With so much in 129 pages, I chose two different sections of interest to focus on: The first is a brief overview of Film Theory and the second being Censorship.

(A brief history of Film Censorship. View a larger version here.)

Having seen several of the films listed during the first paragraph of movies that were censored in schools during the first wave of censorship, I honestly wasn't that surprised. Two of the films that I had seen that were listed were The Lottery and Bonnie and Clyde. The first of these I can definitely see being censored in a school. The film is based off the short story by Shirley Jackson and is, to be frank, quite gruesome. Being a short story, it doesn't offer much insight into the actual thematic details that a longer novella or novel could offer on the consequences and intricacies of the The Lottery. Instead, in its short length, it is just a haunting piece of shocking literature with little appetite for more depth. While an interesting discussion, it's basically the story of stoning someone to death for tradition's sake, so banning the film version of this does not surprise me. The second film, Bonnie and Clyde, is the story of the famous crime duo. While most of the film is just about that, the last scene of the movie is overbearingly bloody. This scene alone I could see being reason for it being banned in schools.

The section goes on to talk about the history of censorship and the basic fights for and against it, but not in too much detail, and were fairly obvious. Those for were parents who felt they should have a say, those against fought using the first amendment. Nothing was a surprise in either of these statements. But, this did get me thinking about my own view on censorship in the classroom for film and literature.

During our discussions on censorship in all of my education classes, I have staunchly fought against almost every single case of censoring a book citing the educational process in some way or that it isn't really all that touchy of a subject or something of that nature. The point being, I have always been very against censoring a teacher's choices in literature. But I'm now contradicting that ideal I've had by agreeing with these censorships. I definitely think both those films are rightfully censored. They're gruesome and serve no educational purpose from them. But does this mean that my viewpoint is skewed when it comes to literature? Or is there truly a distinct difference between the films and the literature I support?

I don't actually have the answers to these questions, but I'm definitely contemplating them these days. If I see the legitimacy in film censorship, what differentiates it from literature censorship?

Currently, my main argument rests on the difference between visual stimulation and written word. The way a film portrays something visually has a defined and concrete image to it, forcing it to be offensive if it hits the right emotive spots. Language, on the other hand, is a bit more amorphous than that. But then what about something like the Huck Finn censorship?

Is the word nigger automatically offense like a bloddy scene at the end of Bonnie and Clyde? I currently don't think so, but I definitely need to reevaluate that.

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In the section on Film Theory, I was most drawn to Marixsm, which focused on film in an idealogical manner and believed that it was an "instrument for social change" (pg. 66, Costanzo) Because of my main focus on literature, I most relate to this because it is how I view literature. By viewing film in this way, it shows how the writers, producers, and everyone else in the film reflect a current state of social norms or a revolt against them. Even in fictionally based films, they reflect their time period and are used to help perpetuate or change society itself.

I find this to be a very applicable and relatable angle to view film because it's also an important aspect of literature. By using images, film can give a more vivid view of life and really strike an audience member in a different, and perhaps stronger, manner than words can. These can help move the wheels of social change or help keep them stagnant. The marxist focus on how images evoke emotions plays well into affecting social roles and norms because it will help motivate people to think in a certain way because it is focused on exactly that.

What I am not sure of is how a marxist point of view would see documentaries, since they are directly meant to influence social change. Are they just the ultimate purpose of a marxist film critic, perhaps? I guess I'd have to study more film from critical view points to have a better understanding of this.

Several of the other theories interested me, such as Realism/Antirealism and semiotics, but didn't seem to delve too deep into them. In fact, most of the chapter felt very uninspired to me. Having read entire books on critical literary theory, I really wanted more information on each theory and how it works and famous criticizers of each theory, etc. Some of the more popular ones like Feminist, Psychoanalytic, and Cultural Studies got a full page or so, but it didn't even delve into the intricacies enough.

I think that all of this information can be applied in the classroom, though. Just like literary theory, film theory is putting on a particular lens and looking at a piece of work through it and then analyzing it using that perspective. Perhaps this "light" version of each lens is enough information to use directly with a high school student to get them thinking in different ways about films. I'll definitely be holding onto this book and have a sticky note on this section for future use in the classroom if/when I show a film and to hopefully help stimulate student thought in different manners.

[PYTASH] Chapter 5

Using song lyrics as poetry is one of the simplest concepts that seems to be overlooked by teachers. Not that the top 40 has the greatest lyrics going on right now, but that could also be something worthwhile to study -- the downfall of poetic justice popular culture gives to a listener.

The positive attitude she goes into it all with is also a key point I think is overlooked by a lot of teachers. I think a lot of teachers think to themselves "oh, the students are going to hate this, but I have to do it" and that ruins the unit for the students because the teacher isn't rubbing off their passion for the content onto the students. While a small part of the chapter, I think it's important to take note of her positive attitude.

The way she read the poems was: Poem->background information. Whereas with literature, it is often the background first. This is actually a solid idea. I can read about a poet and poem's background all I want, but if I don't know what it's about or understand the literary techniques employed, then it will go in one ear and out the other. By giving me the content first, I'll be able to interpret the poem and understand it and then get some background on it to reenforce or reshape my view on its meaning.

[PYTASH] Chapter 3

The amount of books a student should read. Oh, my. Reading this chapter as a student in high school, I would have wanted to hunt the author down and disfigure her. As a pre-service teacher, though? No. In fact, I agree. While students do have extra curricular activities and other classes, I remember in my regular high school English classes it would take almost an entire month, if not longer, to read a single book. We continue to bring standards down and coddle the readers by having them only read one or two chapters per night, when we need to get them to be able to consume a larger amount of literature in one dose to even bother getting to real critical thought and intellectual growth. While Jago may have it a bit extreme at 20 books for her sophomore class, at least she is pushing against the norm of maybe 3-5 in a semester like it was in my school, which simply isn't enough.

There definitely needs to be some balance, and students need to be given the opportunity for critical thought, too. By reading 20 books, students may be flying through the books so fast, they don't have the time to actual stop and smell the literature for its beauty and take their thinking to deeper levels. There are more factors than just English class needs, but I definitely have to take Jago's side on the matter.

[PYTASH] Chapter 1

At this point, the classics vs. young adult literature debate is more than belabored as we have discussed this quite a bit during our education classes in the past. Jago's view on YA lit. actually surprises me and I wonder how this view will continue to show through the book. While in our class last semester, the author had a more liberal view on the matter, Jago is stern believer in using the classics to learn and YA is simply pleasure reading. I definitely agree with this, but not to the extent she seems to in the way she voices her opinion on it.

I would love to spend the entire year studying the classics in a high school classroom, but students simply aren't interested in it enough. There needs to be a way to hook them in. Themes don't change over the years. We're still the same humans dealing with the same identity struggle we always have. There will always be a contemporary piece that reflects well the same thematic concepts of a classic that would interest the reader more. You can then pair it with a classic and get them interested in both stories as they are similar and they'll see the worthwhileness of the one they're not interested in.

[FOOT] The Socially Networked Classroom (sort of)

Didn't get too far into this yet, but I'm super stoked on its presentation and the models its using. It's an extremely informative book thus far, and isn't cumbersome, as a lot of textbooks are. It's forward thinking in what it's trying to utilize to bring a classroom together. I didn't think I'd ever run across a book that actually understands the power behind Web 2.0 tools. Albeit it's already falling behind with new technologies coming out, but I'm not here to discredit it -- the book is spot on for what we as burgeoning teachers need. It is useful in integrating tech such as Facebook and Twitter into the classroom, which may make the students feel more at home. I still have a lot more to consume in the book before I could have something worthwhile to say, but I'll at least get this up here.

[FOOT] History of Facebook

With the release of The Social Network just this year, this article read just like the script of the movie. Drunk Zuckerberg makes a site, screws over some people on the way, and is now super important, but young and cocky. What the article fails to mention is the coming dissent of facebook, or the fact that as it has become more and more popular (and thus, powerful), it has also become a child's playground more than a professional networking site. While the original facebook was a place for college students, and older people to connect and work in a professional manner, Facebook is now a land of mindless farmville-ing and myspace immigrant scene kids taking mirror pictures. Oh, and now the middle aged people are starting to really get into it, including a lot of parents. It's all very odd, but I see nothing but the same downfall that myspace had, and other such popular sites have also experienced.

Social networking will always, in some way, be a part of our lives for years to come, but it will most likely be continually changing every few years as they expand and then retract.

[FOOT] Oral History of the Internet

I'm just going to open by saying this article was dauntingly long. As someone who is an avid computer user and knows his web history, it took a lot of effort to keep reading through this. Started with the whole Soviet Union scare and then it was trying to get it in the home, etc. etc. I guess I'm not sure what to say because this is common knowledge in my circle of friends (yes, we are all computer geeks). Yes Microsoft has done terribly unethical things in their day, but its also completely reinvented the internet and computing as we know it. People have to do what they have to do to get things done, and I'll take innovation with a few sacrifices along the way. What I do find interesting is that they never once mentioned AOL, which was a HUGE player in the internet boom. It completely neglected it, which was a huge misstep on their take on the history of the internet, especially for it coming to the masses. AOL was vastly important to this in the early '00s.

I think knowledge like this is extremely important. As technology integrates into our lives more and more, we can't stand to be ill informed on the matter; the same as politics. The technologically uninformed will be taken advantage of, just as the politically uninformed masses are in today's society.

[FOOT] Little Brother Post

Just finishing the first half of our reading on Little Brother, I'm impressed by the novels ability to convey a serious message, but turn it into a relatable YA choice through its characterization and all of its descriptions. Its language is never daunting, but its not a children's book, which creates a happy medium where high school students have the opportunity to expand their vocabulary without feeling overwhelmed by the material (i.e. Shakespeare, William Blake, James Joyce, Faulkner, etc. etc.). It's Orwellian relation could make a great segue and comparison novel. I have found that as a technologically inclined person, I may be more drawn to the novel. Some of the language choices when referring to the technology may confuse the less informed, which can make the novel a bit of a niche category for computer loving teen boys.

What I think is most important about this book is the way it looks at your rights and how you should stand up for them. While it's a fun plot and you can feel wrapped in the characters the way a good book should, stepping back and looking at the book's overall themes and the way they are presented makes for a great discussion topic. It can pair literature with the real world and real problems going on, especially seeing how quickly technology is taking over our lives. Here is a comic that I think could stir good discussion as well, depending on the grade level, as they would have to know who both Huxley and Orwell are.

Orwell v. Huxley comic.