[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."