The Round House

Rationale:

The issues faced in this book show a teenager dealing with real life decisions. This book would be for high school students only because of its graphic topics like rape and death. There are great themes of family and coming of age. These are important issues that students may need reminded of. Family is something that not all of us have in the typical sense and it will help students to see that who we have are our family and how we stick together.

Teaching Ideas:

Some ways to help students to learn how to use imagery is to have them be news reporters and write up a report on the construction site where they find Mayla’s body. Another way to work with imagery is to have the kids write a diary from one of the character’s points of view on the events happening. The items that are throughout the book can also be turned into symbols that the students must write what they think there meaning is. By writing what they think there meaning is the students can learn about how symbols show emotions.

Challenges:

Because this book has some graphic content the students will need to be told what they should expect when reading. As for parents there will need to be a letter home explaining why we are reading this book and how we plan to deal with the graphic content. Some parents may disagree with the use of this book and so we can arrange a meeting with the parents to discuss why they think it is a poor choice and how we intend to deal with the content to protect their children. Administration may also have issues with the content and would request details on how we will deal with the student’s reactions. As a teacher we need to be prepared to give a valid argument for why we pick books and why we want to teach a book.

That all being said I personally would not use this book in a classroom because of the content. There are many other books that do not touch on these topics that could teach the same.

Book Talk 2

The Girl Death Left Behind Summary

            Beth’s, a young high school girl, family had been invited to the company picnic. She was not feeling well and wanted to stay home. That was the day her entire life changed; her entire family was killed in a car accident. From that day forward, she wished she had died. Her and her best friend had lived next door to each other for most of their lives and now she was being forced to move with her aunt and “perfect” cousin. She wanted nothing move for her life to be over or to go back to what it was, but now she was being forced into a new life and new situation she wanted nothing to do with. In her new life she made a new friend, one her aunt and cousin did not think was a good fit. This friend encouraged her to skip school and do things against the “norm”, and she met a boy who she wanted to make a connection with. Her life came to another screaming halt when she found out that her family home was being sold and her aunt was going to clear out the house. She was devastated, and with the help of her new friend she ran away home. Her aunt finds her and calms her down and they work out an agreement to keep all of her parent’s things in storage so that she can go through them when she is a bit older. The story ends with them visiting her families graves and her finally making peace with all that was happening in her ever-changing world.

I’ll Be Seeing You Summary

Carley was a sixteen-year-old girl who had been scared by a facial deformity. She had been in and out of the hospital trying to get it fixed so she felt more confident about herself. It is during one of her visits she meets a young man named Kyle. Kyle had lost his eyesight during a chemistry experiment with his friends. Carley kept the secret of her scaring from him and they struck it off. This story is a journey of her keeping her secret as they head back into the real world. The problem is that Kyle regains his eyesight and wants badly to see Carley for himself. When Kyle finally learns of her scaring he tries to convince Carley that he does not care but she lashes out and ends things saying she doesn’t want to be a charity case. Kyle is persistent and proves that he cares about her by flying with his uncle a banner over her school on Valentine’s day.

Rationale

            These books show a young reader how they can overcome bad things that happen in their lives. When I was a young reader I had self-esteem issues and dealt a lot with death. These books helped me to see the brighter side and how good can come out of the bad. We all need that push to see the good out of the bad. Life changes all the time and it is our challenges that make us who we are today.

Teaching Ideas

            This book has great topics and may be good for some to read it may not be good books for the entire class. However, these books would be great for an independent reading or a book club talk. It has some tough topics about death that would not be good for some to hear given their background, but it does have good topics of self-esteem and coming of age. Something to consider would be to have students who may be inspired by young women overcoming their personal issues could relate best to this. If I were to use this in the classroom it would be a good book for imagery and how to write comparison stories.

Challenges

            The only challenges I see is some kids my not want to hear about a girl’s struggle with what these two girls face. What I think would be fun is to see a young mans take on what these girls go through and how they shape them into men.

I Read It, But I Don't Get It my own personal experience

When I was young I hated reading. I really hated when a teacher would ask me to read out loud too. I had trouble reading and I couldn’t figure out why, so I just didn’t want to do it. I came up with ways to read without actually reading. However, I could never avoid reading out loud. My problem was I would stumble over words and have a hard time saying them because I have a slight dyslexia and it gets worse when I am put on the spot. For years it made me not want to read at all. Scared me almost to have to admit I needed help. Then one day I was hanging out in the library with my friends during lunch. We were the card playing nerds who did this every day. I was watching my guy play his game and I saw a book on the shelf that looked interesting. I loved looking at book covers because I thought maybe someday I could read a book like that without trouble. I had convinced my parents to buy me lots of books in the hopes that one day I would actually be able to read one. This day was that day. Without thinking I took the book to the counter and checked it out. I read it cover to cover by the next day lunch and returned it. This prompted me to just start grabbing books that I liked the cover of and just read it. If I struggled with it, I quit reading it and got another.

I still struggle today with my dyslexia, but I have now learned how to handle it better. Some days it is still pretty bad, but I power through. I recently met a kid who suffered from dyslexia, he is failing out of school and has no desire to even graduate. He is less than six months from graduation and less than two months from his eighteenth birthday. He told me he plans on dropping out the day after his birthday and getting a job. He and I talked for thirty minutes about reading required for school and how he just didn’t read because he could not find a helpful way to do it. When I told him that I suffered the same issue and was just about to finish my teaching certification he asked me how I do it. What I told him was there is no one way to read when you have dyslexia. Different texts take special treatment. I will sometime read and then reread the same thing 3 times before the text will understand. However, I also told him about reading for pleasure and what that did for me. When I finally got into reading my own things I was able to identify words and times my dyslexia would flare up and how to combat it or just take a break. He liked that I had figured it out on my own and wanted me to help him. I told him that I would help him no problem, but he had to put forth the effort and contact me on his own. I have never heard from him.

When we slow down and hear what is causing our students the problems we can really try and help them. Something I do know is if I don’t know a word or I am unsure I am reading it correctly I will type what I see into dictionary.com and they will tell me what I am reading. It has helped when because when I see that word again I remember what it means. We all have struggles when it comes to reading we just have to find the trade off of how to make it into something we can enjoy or want to read.

The Art of TPA Lesson Plans

The edTPA is very strictly laid out and if done correctly and according to the guidelines a teacher candidate should have no issues. Three things to always consider while working on the edTPA is 1) Planning, 2) Instruction, and 3) Assessment Tasks. Each of these tasks will be working together to form the overall binder. When planning one part you must always consider all the parts. Artifacts that are going to be considered part of the edTPA are exactly what we do as part of lesson planning. We need to have the lesson plan, content, context, video clips of the teacher candidate teaching, assessments, and materials needed to teach the lesson plans.

What we learn going through the education program is how to write a lesson plan and prepare all the materials to teach. We learn how to focus our lesson but also to always consider how to make the lesson better. We do research and understand deeper how a lesson plan can be helpful to the students. All our learning throughout the education program helps us learn how to be teachers and how what we plan and organize can impact our students. No first-time teacher is perfect but if we follow our guidelines and what we are taught throughout the process we can slowly adapt and learn how to better serve our students.

When looking through the TPA lesson plan guidelines it is all clearly laid out so that someone can pick up the lesson plan, read it, and teach it. The lesson plan goes over in detail how long it should take for the lesson to what Common Core State Standards we are teaching to. Further analysis of the lesson plan would show a break down of the lesson during the class period; telling exactly how the class should move through the information they are learning that day. This process makes it easy for the student teacher to walk into a classroom well prepared for what may come at them that day.

The Dialogue of Social Justice

Critical Social Justice according to Gustavo Pereira in “What do we Need to be Part of Dialogue? From Discursive Ethics to Critical Social Justice” I learned that “critical social justice is to ensure the agency of citizens, which enables them to take part, not only in public discussions about how resources are distributed, but also about matters such as what should be produced, how to do it and through what kind of production” (280). Basically, what this translates for me is that to have the discussions that we have about education or our laws we first need to understand the world that we live in and the implications behind what is being asked. Pereira goes on to argue that without a “normative criterion for moral validity” we also must understand “justifications carried out by discursive ethics” (281). Pereira argues that to understand where social justice comes from and where it leads we first must understand the dialogue of how ethics play a role in decision making or in a sense “rational binding force of moral judgments” (281).

We all have a moral obligation to the world and people around us. What teachers need to show the students in their classrooms is that we all have a moral obligation to be involved in what goes on in our country and our state. Students can learn about social justice or moral obligations if they are pressed into situations that force them to make decisions; however, as teachers we have a moral obligation to introduce our students to the social justices before they reach that point. One way I can see teaching social justice is by having the students read a bill that is up for vote and then have them do research into it as if they were going to vote for it or against it. This brings the conversation of the real world right into the classroom and allows students to understand important issues that affect them.

Pereira, Gustavo. “What do we Need to be Part of Dialogue? From Discursive Ethics to Critical Social Justice.” Critical Horizons, vol. 16, no. 3, Aug. 2015, pp. 280-298.

The World of Popular Culture and Reading

Culture is something that very important and students need to understand the cultures that they will be subjected to as adults. Using popular culture in the classroom to help students learn is a great way to teach them but also introduce important ideas to them. In “Popular Culture and Critical Media Pedagogy they state: “…conceptualizes society as a terrain of domination and resistance and engages in a critique of domination and of the ways that media culture engages in reproducing relationships of domination and oppression”. What the writers are arguing is that our culture is an oppressed culture and must be understood as such. Another part to the oppression that should be understood is that the “rich” or upper class have all the power and therefore push their agenda and thoughts on the lower class, thus creating the oppression. When we read that lower class or different ethnicities are illiterate it is the upper class telling them they must be this way. In reality, the lower class or different ethnicities can read but often need to find what they are passionate about.

As teachers we must teach that students hold the power. Once they realize they hold the power they will succeed. By using Hip-Hop Culture we can show students: “their oppression because it relates to their own experiences and teaches them to be themselves, fight for what they believe in, and pursue their dreams”. The major thing that we should all consider when thinking of using any culture or text is: “Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world. Reading the word is not merely preceded by reading the world, but by a certain form of writing it or rewriting it, that is, of transforming it by means of conscious, practical work”. Why do we read? What meaning does it bring to our lives? Why should we understand the world around us? All things to consider when picking a text and reading it.

Oppression of Students

There are many ways to teach children information so that they excel in life. It has often been wondered how to teach kids and which way is best. Paulo Freire believes that children in today's education are being oppressed and many would agree with him. What he describes is called banking. Banking is filling children like they are a bank account and expecting the information to be fed back out just the way it was fed in. This is not the most recommended way of teaching a child because it leaves so many holes in the education system. A teacher does research and learns a lot of information. The teacher then feeds the information that they learned to the child expecting the child to remember it all and be able to feed it back. The problem with this is the teacher is doing all the work and the students are expected to remember everything.

The problem with this is the responsibility is all on the teacher. The teacher does all the work and learns all the information first hand, and the student is fed what the teacher deems as important. This mentality is set up as “the teacher thinks and the students are thought about”. Not the students think. The students need to learn how to form their own thought process on learning information otherwise they will always rely on someone else to give them key points. When a child graduates into the real world they know information but not how to expand their knowledge and keep learning about the world around them. It is our jobs as educators to teach them the information, but also to teach them how to find the information for themselves and how to work through the process on their own. Students need to learn how to “perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation”.