Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexis's book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was a different read for me. I'm used to actual fiction, romance, and dystopian writings more than anything, so having a fictionalization of a true account was kind of different for me. The connections I tied from this book to other true stories of Native American tales made me see this book as less fictional. I am almost curious to know if this book is considered fictional because of how he writes the book instead of what he actually says within the book. This would be a book that I would love to do a Q&A with the author.

On a completely separate note, the contextualization within the book was awesome. I strongly believe in added context and realia to everything. I love the little comics included and the further connection it added to what was being said. It reminds me of metafiction, where you just keep dumping your thoughts. When you are writing and this random thought of a comic or how a character looks or anything that relates to what you just wrote pops into your head and you decide to write it down. It was a great view of the subconscious thought process of the author and I loved it. Giving context or realia to the words you are providing and also help provide a better understanding of what is being said. Students can draw better connections to words that are given context and can relate more to them.
The book, in general, I don't think I would include in a curriculum, but instead might use as an example of something or a couple pages as an example piece. This book has some intense topics that I would not recommend for a grade level below 11. You would also have to think about your students and your environment around the school before even thinking about having this book in the classroom.

The Education of Margot Sanchez by Lilliam Rivera

This book was a great "discovering yourself" kind of book. It held great messages within it and had a great overall message of making sure you stay who you are and you don't change who you are for other people. This is an important concept for K-12 students to understand because of course, this is stuff they deal with on a daily. In school, you have the popular group along with all of the other groups and the totem pole of popularity. It is always the worst for the girls because of the passive aggressiveness, the gossip, and just bullying in general. This book would be a great read for teenage girls to maybe give them a second thought as to what they are doing in school and if they are truly being themselves.
The topic of urbanization is throughout the entire book but not the main theme. Rivera did a great job at showing the domino effect urbanization has on a small, locally-owned store versus a large superstore. I enjoyed that insight into this particular idea in this book. I am from a small town and every year I notice it growing more and more because more people are moving there. First, the high school was expanded and now housing is expanding. Currently, there are new apartment structures under construction which are awesome to see actually since there weren't any before. With more people comes change, unfortunately, all of the change is not always for the best. We are losing our only bowling alley because the owners just don't have the money to keep it running. The bowling alley is our only place of fun or activity for all ages. They have bowling leagues from ages 10-100. They have a special olympics bowling program to be fully inclusive, and they have a small arcade room for kids to just hang out in. That is not the only small business we have lost, we have lost hair salons, nail salons, mom and pop grocery stores, and we lost Rosaurs too. People are trying their hardest to come together and open a new shop here and there in the abandoned buildings, but it's becoming harder. Urbanization can be a good thing, but at the same time, it can have many consequences.
Also, Rivera did a great job with the multi-cultural aspect of the book. This book was not only centered around a Hispanic-American main character but also embraced the culture and environment they were living in. She did a great job with using the language throughout the book by including Spanish. I enjoyed the multi-cultural aspect of the book because of it diving into the culture and language of the family.
I'm not sure if I would personally teach this book in a classroom, but I might suggest it to people to read.

Readicide

I want to start off by saying I completely agree that schools are killing the love of reading because of the practices in place. I used to hate reading the required readings in school. They were boring, or stupid, or over analyzed and it sucked. I used to completely skim the required reading, for homework purposes, and then read my own book. I always had the problem that my own book though was not in the school system and therefore I couldn’t get credit for reading it in my class. I noticed many students in my class though never did any of the readings for the in-class text and was always ‘winging-it’ with in-class discussions and homework. Also, everyone always hated SR – silent reading. There were only a few of us that actually enjoyed the silent reading time, where we were able to read our own books in the classroom.

I think one of the biggest problems with the required readings within the class was that every time we did one, it was for the same purpose. Follow the characters, follow the plot, summarize, follow the timeline, and write a book report. We did that all through middle school and then even into high school. Constantly spitting out summaries of either what we read or the entire book. The same purpose over and over again throughout the many years in grade school.

As students get older, they need a better purpose to motivate them to do things. The purpose should not stay the same throughout the years, it should get more complex, more individual and provide an authentic reading experience. We as teachers need to remember to relate the students to the reading. We want them to stop thinking, “oh we are reading another book and summarizing it?” Also, as much as I love the books I read in middle school and high school, they are starting to become less relatable to the newer generations. For example, The Outsiders was what I read in seventh grade and was considered a “diverse” book because it was about a different era. Granted, I enjoyed it, it was an interesting book for me, however, today's generations are not going to relate to the boys in that book anymore and are not going to understand some of the things they do or say in that book. To teach that book today, there would have to be a ton of scaffolding to go before it and maybe even a history lesson for kids to understand how things were back then. So we have to make sure we are updating our curriculum and making sure that what we are using in our class is easily relatable to the ‘day and age’ we are in. It is the same aspect with the development of technology in the classroom and how that is updated almost every year or so, we need to be doing the same with our curriculum and readings especially to keep up with the generations.

The point Gallagher makes about the fact that schools are valuing the development of test-takers more than readers, or anything else for that matter, I completely agree with as well. I know by now everyone knows about how controversial the subject of schools teaching to the test is, and how people are for and against it and everywhere in-between. For Gallagher to bring up that point was interesting to me to see how he specified it as one of the causes of readicide. Don’t get me wrong, I see that it can be a cause for readicide, but at the same time I slightly disagree. This is where I believe the teacher over-teaching the book could play a bigger role than the teaching to the test aspect. We have to teach to the test and the standards with everything we do, it is just up to us as teachers to make sure our curriculum pertains to our students and is still giving students purpose, connections, and motivation.  

"I read it, but I don't get it" - Cris Tovani

First off, I love this book.
How he started his classroom by telling the students basically how stupid book reports were and how he even used to cheat reading too was great. It was interesting to hear about his way. I guess thinking about it, my way of 'cheating reading' was skimming. I skimmed the first chapter, then one or two in the middle, and then the end. That is how I used to write book reports. Unless I was actually interested in the book, then I read the entire thing. But to be honest, my skimming is what got me through most of my humanities classes here at Eastern. One thing Tovani mentioned was seven strategies used by successful readers "existing knowledge, ask questions, draw inferences, monitor their comprehension, "fix-up" strategies when meaning breaks down, determine what is important, and synthesize information". I have actually been over these strategies before in my ESL classes, even though they were explicitly said like they are in this book. Even right now, we are talking about the steps of pre-reading, during reading, and post-reading and activities and things that you can do in each step. Which is awesome because that relates so much to that article we read from the Universities of California. So I have all of this background knowledge from different classes and main topics for me to connect and even apply to my own classroom.
Along with the strategies, he also talked about six cues that readers use, which I actually really liked. They are graphophonic cues, lexical cues, syntactic cues, semantic cues, schematic cues, and pragmatic cues. Again, this relates back to my ESL classes and how English language learners learn to read. The connections from this book to my classes were numerous and helpful. They may even be more helpful for that class than this class.

Tovani mentioned in chapter three in the subsection "Thinking Aloud" that "thinking aloud show students how an expert reader makes sense of the text. By sharing your thinking out loud, you make the elusive process of comprehension more concrete." (26). Again, with my connection to ESL, I can understand this and the fact that it also provides that auditory/visual effect for reading. If you are reading something that is also on a screen, you can talk out loud as you question things when you pre-read. One example would be the titles and sub-titles. Before you start reading, you can go over the title and sub-titles found within the text and draw inferences maybe make predictions, maybe even talk about it and think about what you already know relating to them.

One concept that was widely used throughout the book was self-monitoring. How students need to be in charge of their own reading and be "conscious of the thinking taking place inside his head." (35).  Throughout any lesson, we have to make sure students are the spotlight, not ourselves. We should be trying our hardest to make students more aware of the capability they have on their own and the responsibility they have. Students are in charge of their own choices and their own learning. It's just like that saying, "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink", you can give students everything they need to succeed, but you can't make them succeed, that is up to them. You are just there to support and set them up for success.

Tovani provided an appendix full of worksheets that he personally used within his classroom. Just looking through them, I can already see the potential for many of them to be applied to my current edTPA. I enjoyed the fact that they are focused on the students' connections, inferences, predictions, thoughts, and opinions. All of the worksheets he provided could encourage students to do these things on their own when reading on their own later in life. These worksheets connect with the strategies he provided within the first chapter. They are a great way of explicitly showing the students how to use the strategies he gives them.

edTPA - Making Good Decisions

Within this informational PDF was a sub-section called "How do I represent my thinking and teaching in writing". This sub-section actually helped me think more clearly about the edTPA. All of our choices and how we decide to do things within our classroom as teachers shows our thinking. It shows our originality as a person and how and why we decided to do a certain activity or teach a lesson a certain way. This is the originality factor to teaching that I love. We have the freedom to teach and express our own thoughts and ideas in the classroom as we please. It might not match other teacher's or be perfect, but it's us. But even so, with that originality factor, we still have to justify and give a constant rationale for why we chose to do things a certain way. As teachers, it seems as if we are constantly going to have to be explaining ourselves. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that aspect, but of course, I'm going to do it.

I love how they even included in there "Perfect teaching is not expected". Well duh, no one is perfect, there will never be a perfect teacher.

Giving purpose to everything we do is important as well. It is called our learning objective, but it is really the purpose. What is the purpose of the lesson? What is your purpose for teaching this lesson? how does it connect to other lesson purposes? Understanding it this way is way easier for me to clearly see what I'm doing.

Another comment made is "If you focus only on teaching facts and/or following procedures without deepening students' understanding of related concepts, you will not fully address your subject-specific learning focus." Even though this is very specific, it is broadly true. This actually relates back to the "pedagogy of oppression" and the idea of a banking system at schools. If teachers are constantly spitting out facts and procedures and telling students what to do without having the students think for themselves or provide their own opinions, then they won't actually be learning anything. They will honestly only be learning how to memorize and repeat. I'm glad that this was included within here. It helps reiterate the fact that we are deepening students' understanding of not only what we are teaching, but also their own thoughts and opinions on it and their own way of understanding it.

Social Justice - Why is it important in our classrooms?

Social justice being taught within a classroom is a touchy subject. Faculty might question it, administrators might question it, and parents might question it. However, students will encounter social justice every single day out in the world. Acknowledging the fact that our students face social justice and are keen observers of social justice and then relating that to academics in the classroom, can help students make real-world connections. Acknowledging and teaching social justice in the classroom is important because students may see it or experience it, but never understand it. Having an understanding of what social justice is what students need to be able to navigate the outside world and explore their own connections to social justice in the world. Students need to understand that they have a voice, they have a choice, and they have a right to stand up for their voice and their choice. With how much controversy and social justice that is in the world today, we need to be empowering our students to use their voice. Granted we also need to teach them how to use their voice appropriately and correctly.

According to Marilyn Cochran-Smith, "a social justice framework is one that "actively address[es] the dynamics of oppression, privilege, and isms, [and recognizes] that society is the product of historically rooted, institutionally sanctioned stratification along socially constructed group lines that include race, class, gender, secual orientation, and ability [among others]." (School of Education). Having a social justice framework means you must guide your students in understanding oppression, socialization, and challenging hierarchies. Guiding students on how to self-reflect on where they fit into this world and how they fit in will help them connect themselves. It may even guide you as a teacher. What does a social justice framework do? "It pays primary attention to how people, policies, practices, curricula, and institutions may be used to liberate rather than oppress those least served by our decision making." (School of Education).

Social justice is important in our classrooms. Helping students acknowledge their voice and understand what oppression is, can not only help them out in the world but also give insight into their own decisions and how they affect other people.

Quotes are pulled from: https://education.csuci.edu/justice-conference/faq.htm
An excerpt from a larger work.
I also found a teacher blog post that was very insightful and helped lead my own ideas. You can find it here: https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/why-teaching-about-social-justice-matters

Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom

Within this writing, there were several ideas and realizations that stood out to me. One of which was when they said that, "it was only with a pedagogy firmly committed to freedom and social change that we were able to motivate students to develop sophisticated academic literacies." (pg.4). With the word freedom being so powerful, this sentence stuck out to me. As an English teacher, I want to give my students as much freedom in the classroom as possible, but I also want them to learn and get their work done. Giving students freedom within assignments, however, can be the most motivating thing you can do. By giving your students the freedom to find their own purpose and topic for their writing, you are giving them something they want to do. I have always loved being able to choose my own topic for my papers, just because then I was more motivated to write them.

Another thing that I found interesting was the realization that multiculturalism in the literature we choose for our students was "simply offering texts written by people of color or featuring people of color as the protagonist." (5). I never really thought about this personally, but now reflecting on all of the multicultural readings I have done, I'm recognizing the fact that our readings were just written by people of color of including at least one protagonist character that was of color. Later on, it says how, "these so-called multicultural texts that were equally, if not more, disempowering of students of color than more traditional less diverse texts. An oppressive rendering of a culturally diverse text is still oppressive." (5). This is something we need to remember as teachers. We need to think about what our students are reading and how it could relate in any way to them. If we are claiming a text is multicultural, it needs to portray that culture, not just be written by someone of that culture. Especially in this day and age, we have to be careful what we are giving our students to read. This relates to our book talks in class and how we present our rationale for each book we discuss about teaching it in the classroom. Having multicultural texts can help our students "arrive at an implicit understanding of what they have in common with those they have been taught to perceive as different." (6). Children are not taught to see people differently based off of their skin or cultural, they just make friends. Why are we not teaching our students throughout the years to continue seeing other skin-tones and cultures as just people rather than 'different' or any other social depiction they might have? Including the multicultural texts and having "cross-cultural literacy study may allow us to see ourselves in others even as we see these others as different in important and extraordinary ways." (6).

On the topic of texts, I liked how it was put on the reasoning behind using literature of other times and places: "they would begin to make connections to their own everyday experiences while gaining an understanding of similarities across time and cultures." (5-6). So instead of having students break down the readings and pick them apart, we can have them draw connections between then and now and understand how things were and how things have changed. This is so interesting to me and different then what I've been doing the last three years. In almost all of our literature classes, we are picking apart and tearing down the readings instead of connecting and finding understanding in them. A connecting idea that was discussed as well is the notion of using popular culture in the classroom. By having pop-culture in the classroom we are giving the students the potential to connect their own everyday experiences to their academic literacies. It also gives students an opportunity to study their own everyday culture and what is in their culture. I do believe this is a great concept, it would be more interesting to see more research on this particular concept and see how you could incorporate it into the classroom.