It’s so bittersweet typing up this reflection on the 332 class this semester. I’ve truly enjoyed the class time that we have all shared together. I’ve met people and connected with other future teachers on such a surreal level, it’s hard to say goodbye to the class. I feel like when people told me in high school that college is going to be a massive collaboration of brilliant human beings and magnificent ideas they were lying to me until this point. Until now college has really been just a glorified high school. I’m not sure if this being my first semester at Chico State is the reason, or if this class is the reason (let’s say it was all this class), but I’m so happy that I can be around people that I met in this class until I graduate.

 

This may seem weird, and Kim, I don’t want you to take this in a bad way, but I didn’t realize I was learning until about the last few weeks of class when it all started to come together. It was hard for me to grasp the message of the dense articles we read as a class. Once we started collaborating with each other and doing the article groups and the Ignite talks, I really started connecting all the dots and seeing the bigger picture.

Literacy is not just reading Shakespeare and being able to write a research paper on Hamlet. Literacy is texting your friends- “Yo bff, where u @” and emailing your instructor- “Dr. Jaxon, my sincerest apologies on my absence from last class.Literacy is playing Portal until 3 am on a school night, all to realize that the cake is a lie! Literacy is playing Skyrim and discovering a whole new world, with new missions, and creating a new race.

Literacy can be so much more than what the standards make students think literacy is. The current system we teach students with in public schools is one based on failure, not success. When we try and mold all to fit into one definition of abilities, it’s only natural that there will be failure. One of the biggest realizations of the semester for me was about second language English speakers. It baffles me that a student that is learning English as their second language is deemed less literate, or sometimes even illiterate, than another student whose only language is English. That’s something that needs to change.

 

Being a future teacher, I want intertwine technology with my lessons. If we have a project where they could make a PowerPoint or a poster board, I’ll have them create a movie trailer, or a website. I’d get all my students on a Google Doc to submit rough drafts, so they can ask me any question at any time and I have more access to them.

A question I’m still trying to process, would I let my students use phones in class? Who knows. Maybe I’ll experiment when I actually am a teacher.

 

As far as my internship went at PHS, I learned so much about classroom dynamics and classroom diversity. It was great to have a female mentor, she was able to point out to me when a high school male was trying to challenge her authority, she was open about how she deals with all issues. I learned about socioeconomic classes, and how they affect kids. But most importantly I learned that I LOVE KIDS. I love the high school age too, people told me I was crazy for wanting to teach these kids, that it’s too late in the game to try and get through to them. Maybe I am crazy for wanting to teach them, even after seeing how the classroom dynamics are in my internship. But I truly feel that structuring my classroom in a way that is comfortable to my students interests and needs (embracing new technology). I overheard so many conversations about “Teen Wolf” and “Walking Dead” in the classroom, what if we wrote an essay as the main character of one of these TV series through the lens of Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. I can have these students writing masterpieces without them even knowing it, but when they look back they will have the creative and literary power to take on college. I don’t know, I just know that I will never look at my class as a percentage. I want to value the effort of each student. I want them to feel like they have a voice, and opinion, and a magnificent brain (because they do!).

 

Thank you for every thing Kim, I hope that I have many more classes and semesters with you.

 

My article group ended up being very interesting! I initially joined the group because the idea of hip hop and literacy seemed so out there that I just had to see for myself how the two actually went hand in hand. After reading the articles and working with my group I can’t wait to utilize hip hop as a study and literacy method in my classroom when I’m teaching. Some of the highlights from the group work would be watching the video that the middle school students made for their science class and then actually doing our activity together as a group before we presented it to the class. That activity went hand in hand with the article we read about brain stimulation and freestyle rapping. I’m very glad that I joined the hip hop group. I definitely have a new appreciation for hip hop!

http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/breaking-binary-facebook-teachable-moments/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HybridPed+%28Hybrid+Pedagogy%3A+A+Digital+Journal+of+Teaching+%26+Technology%29

 

While I was reading this article this activity that I did while I was in middle school just kept coming into my head that was very similar to the activity that the teacher in this novel had her students do, although we did not end up tying the lesson back into a novel. We listed the “attractive” qualities that we felt both men and women should be according to their gender. Under the female category there were things like, “big butt” “big boobs” “skinny” etc, etc. What really stuck with me was the fact that the majority of times these three things cannot be obtained simultaneously without plastic surgery. And for me, a 13 year old chubby kid in middle school, that was one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned. I’m not sure where I was going with this but this is where it’s taken me. I’m also not sure what the heck I meant by that, I’ve had a long day.

I had mixed feelings about this movie. I thought that the children in it were amazing, adorable, and very determined and I think that’s fantastic that they were so excited to succeed at the Spelling Bee. However, I don’t think that that sort of competition is a good one to gauge literacy on. The fact that it is a competition with one winner proves that point even more. The Bee doesn’t take into account where each child came from and what sort of resources they were given, so Angela taught herself the words but the wealthy girls and boys had tutors and had time devoted to a professional every day to help them learn how to spell. I just don’t think that it would be a fair judge of literacy. Also, even one of the contestants says that it’s all luck, and it really is. So how do you prepare or guide someone to win a competition that is based on luck? And when a kid doesn’t make it to the end she may feel less than her peers.

Just Girls helps the reader understand literacy by looking into the less noticed forms of reading and writing. The purpose of the book is for the reader to understand that literacy effects students in more ways than just through testing and standards. The most interesting part of the book thus far for me has been about yearbooks. Some of the “trailer park kids” didn’t even get a yearbook because their parents didn’t have enough money and because none of their friends would be in the yearbook. Since they didn’t buy a yearbook it leads me to think that no one would ask for them to sign theirs. If someone isn’t in the yearbook then they aren’t seen as part of the “group” therefore the owner of the yearbook’s status would have been lowered to have some “nobody” sign their yearbook. The authority figures of the school use yearbook signing time as a bribe for students to do well through the last few weeks of school, but that reward totally excludes the student that didn’t buy a yearbook. What are those students to do during yearbook signing time?

 

I remember when I was in middle school and high school and it was time to get yearbooks, some people would actually turn down signing some yearbooks. That is a prime example of rejection and the students knew it.

 

This book focus on the underground types of literacy, I chose a picture of bathroom graffiti to showcase this blog because we have seen bathroom graffiti from the time we started school up until now and we will forever see bathroom graffiti. That’s a form of literacy no one really thinks about.