[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.

[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.