I was born and raised outside of Chicago, so I don't identify with traditional MN culture. I'm not Swedish, I've not eaten lye soaked fish, nor have I ever seen a moose. I had a Chicago accent which is now fading into non-descript Midwestern. I was raised Catholic, so I can recognize most biblical references in texts, but like REM, I've lost my religion.
I am a white person and my students identify me as German because of what I say when they sneeze. "Gesundheit" means "good health" and I think it is a nice sentiment. Also, I don't really like saying "bless you" because of the religious connotations. Once I was telling my students a story about a good friend of mine, a devout Jew, and one of my students interrupted me asking if I was "German, right?"
Apparently, the student thought that Germans and Jews still could not be friends because of the Nazi persecution of Jews from the 20's, 30's, 40's, and beyond. I had to explain to him that not all Germans were Nazis and not all Nazis are Germans and how there were even German Jews. This was mind blowing to him.
Because I deal with "marginalized" or "alternative" populations, I have to be transparent. My students can smell a phony from a mile away and I want to be genuine with them. In this exchange, we find mutual respect.
Monday, August 1, 2011
August 1st
I accidentally deleted my Marigolds writing. But, process is more important than product as great men have said.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
7-28-11
Think of an instance where a student's cultural background and belief structure informed how they interacted with your classroom or a piece of literature you were teaching.
Oh, there are so many fun examples of this. Where to begin? I found that when I was teaching Frankenstein, students pulled religion and personal ethics into the text quite a bit. Students would say things like, "But, that's just the way God made him, God has a plan for everyone, etc." Students also felt strongly on either end of the "is it right for Victor to kill him" spectrum. Some students said yes, that he wasn't human and wanted to know if they could use the death penalty as a form of sentencing in their mock trial of The Creature v. V. Frankenstein (I said, "no"). Others said that it wasn't right to take somebody's life just because they didn't come out they way you had planned. These students often used God as an example. I found this really interesting because the Creature uses the analogy of being "an abortion," but none of my students ever delved into that topic. I did not press it on them, because I did not find it to be a beneficial discussion for our educational objectives in the unit.
After watching clips of the Brannagh Frankenstein, I had my classes vote on which actors they would cast to play the various characters in Frankenstein. When one student suggested Denzel Washington as the Monster, the students broke out in an uproar saying that Frankenstein couldn't be Black, and asking me if they could cast Black people in the roles. I said of course and asked them how casting a Black man as Frankenstein's monster with a white Victor would change the meaning of the story. What if it was a Black cast with the exception of the Monster? The students got really interested in how the actor changed the meaning of the text.
When I showed the film, Jurassic Park, my students commented on how the only two black actors on screen (one for only a few moments at the beginning) were doomed to die. They commented on the Hollywood trend of killing off black characters. Instead of dismissing this observation, I opened the topic up for discussion. I think this surprised a number of my students, because they didn't have much to say afterwards. I pushed by asking of examples of satire they had observed in other films and they talked about scenes from Scary Movie and Scream 4. The students seemed, not surprisingly, engaged that the classroom forum could be open to matters of import they experienced in their own lives.
Oh, there are so many fun examples of this. Where to begin? I found that when I was teaching Frankenstein, students pulled religion and personal ethics into the text quite a bit. Students would say things like, "But, that's just the way God made him, God has a plan for everyone, etc." Students also felt strongly on either end of the "is it right for Victor to kill him" spectrum. Some students said yes, that he wasn't human and wanted to know if they could use the death penalty as a form of sentencing in their mock trial of The Creature v. V. Frankenstein (I said, "no"). Others said that it wasn't right to take somebody's life just because they didn't come out they way you had planned. These students often used God as an example. I found this really interesting because the Creature uses the analogy of being "an abortion," but none of my students ever delved into that topic. I did not press it on them, because I did not find it to be a beneficial discussion for our educational objectives in the unit.
After watching clips of the Brannagh Frankenstein, I had my classes vote on which actors they would cast to play the various characters in Frankenstein. When one student suggested Denzel Washington as the Monster, the students broke out in an uproar saying that Frankenstein couldn't be Black, and asking me if they could cast Black people in the roles. I said of course and asked them how casting a Black man as Frankenstein's monster with a white Victor would change the meaning of the story. What if it was a Black cast with the exception of the Monster? The students got really interested in how the actor changed the meaning of the text.
When I showed the film, Jurassic Park, my students commented on how the only two black actors on screen (one for only a few moments at the beginning) were doomed to die. They commented on the Hollywood trend of killing off black characters. Instead of dismissing this observation, I opened the topic up for discussion. I think this surprised a number of my students, because they didn't have much to say afterwards. I pushed by asking of examples of satire they had observed in other films and they talked about scenes from Scary Movie and Scream 4. The students seemed, not surprisingly, engaged that the classroom forum could be open to matters of import they experienced in their own lives.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Journal number 1 for Sam's class
One thing that really struck me in the Pirie reading was the idea of being an anti-Barney. It seems that this is a growing trend in education. Several instructors have waxed on about the devastating ramifications of the "I'm special" ideology. In my own classroom experiences as an instructor, I too have seen students effected negatively by this me centered approach to learning. Many students cannot find value in lessons if the connection to themselves is not overt or immediate. Students I have worked with also tend to have concrete cultural understandings about others they identify as different from themselves and make value judgments based on those flawed, often stereotypic associations. To say that a better trend in education would be transparency and pursue explorations of differences is refreshing, to say the least. In a strictly business sense, this teaching philosophy provides more real world worth. If I am truly a member of a "global society," I must know that I am intrinsically different than others, AND that does not mean I am any better or worse because of it. Seeing myself as "the other" and understanding how I make different individuals and groups "the other" means that I am one step closer to understanding the politics of my cultural identity.
Additionally, I really liked how the text troubled the waters for traditional literary texts. I think film is an essential weapon in the teacher's pedagogy arsenal. Film is designed to reach as many audiences as possible and how that changes literature, which is very much an intimate, individualized experience, is fascinating to me. When students get into the politics of adaptation, they feel like insiders; they know secrets and truths the rest of humanity flocking to cinema's are not privy to. This can be exciting. Knowledge is a form of privilege, after all.
From the other article, I really loved that the connection was made between inclusivity and politics. As I wrote my response, I used the word "politics" three or four times. That is because I think everything we do as teachers is a political act, whether we know it or not. How we look, how we sound, how we treat certain students, and certainly what texts we chose to include and exclude.
Additionally, I really liked how the text troubled the waters for traditional literary texts. I think film is an essential weapon in the teacher's pedagogy arsenal. Film is designed to reach as many audiences as possible and how that changes literature, which is very much an intimate, individualized experience, is fascinating to me. When students get into the politics of adaptation, they feel like insiders; they know secrets and truths the rest of humanity flocking to cinema's are not privy to. This can be exciting. Knowledge is a form of privilege, after all.
From the other article, I really loved that the connection was made between inclusivity and politics. As I wrote my response, I used the word "politics" three or four times. That is because I think everything we do as teachers is a political act, whether we know it or not. How we look, how we sound, how we treat certain students, and certainly what texts we chose to include and exclude.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Final Reflection!
Allison Witham
Rick Lybeck
CI 5461
8 March 2011
Reflecting on Starting Over
It is currently four thirty in the morning. I have been trying for the last six hours to scan in, import to my blog, and post a series of comics I have been drawing that depict memorable moments thus far in my student teaching. The reason I chose to draw comics instead of keeping a traditional reflection journal is twofold: for one, I enjoy drawing and looking forward to getting to draw helps me be more diligent about reflecting frequently and relaxes me if I am reflecting on something unpleasant, secondly, because comics utilize humor, I feel that this form will help me process and get over a lot of the uncertainty and unfortunate events that happen at school. And, I have to say, this practice has been working. I’ve become very meticulous about the process of sketching, then drawing, then tracing, and finally inking the comics. I have even purchased a light box to help make tracing a much more fluid process.
Unfortunately, in all my preparation for our final project I forgot to take into account the fact that I have never in my life used a scanner. Nor, did I envision how difficult sizing the comics would be in order to upload them to my blog. I have not given up yet, you will eventually get an e-mail in the coming weeks, loaded with exclamation points, alerting you to the fact that I have finally succeeding in getting the comics up online, but for tonight/this morning, this is not the case. So here, in one reflection, is a depiction of a technological failure of epic proportions as well as an example of technology as the knight in shining armor.
Needless to say, as I stood over our printer/scanner combo, who glared back at me with its glassy display mocking my technological inaptitude with every rearrangement of its ink cartridges, I wanted to cry. But then I thought, is this what it has come to? I have spent the last nine months learning more about technological teaching tools than most practicing teachers have heard of in their entire career and I am crying over a battered, 1999 HP printer?
Realizing how absurd this scene really was, I re-read the final project details and went for a walk to think things over. As the cold, damp air seeped into my nose and down my throat, some of the lines of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood popped into my head. Thomas has a scene in which three drowned sailors come and haunt the blind Captain Cat, and the description of how the sea salted air tastes in their lungs was bouncing around my brain as I trudged through the slushy streets of Seward. Hardly anyone was out, it being three o’clock in the morning on a Thursday, and the opening monologue of the play ran through my mind. I realized that this was the perfect substitute for my comic (no pun intended) catastrophe and headed back home to try out Voicethread. Speaking the lines of the poem I love so much was lovely, and made me forget the frustrations I had been mulling over for the last five hours. I locked myself in our back room, put my face by the computer, and read out loud to myself. The playback feature of Voicethread is also interesting. Hearing your own voice makes you hypercritical of your verbal presentation all of the sudden, which makes me think that this might be a great scaffolding tool for students preparing to give a speech or presentation to the classroom who might be particularly nervous. They can practice go through the speech without stopping and then go back through and listen to where they had difficulty, stumbled, or mumbled.
As I mention in the blog post and in the Voicethread, Dylan Thomas wrote the piece as a “play for voices” and it is most commonly done as a radio play. In thinking about the question of how digital media can best enable a text to be fully realized, I think Voicethread is actually perfect for the play. I would love to bring the text and Voicethread into the classroom and assign scenes to pairs of the students to read as the two voices. I would also like to have the scenes doubled up so different pairs of students could hear how different voices affect the text. The text also has a terrific amount of poetic and language devises such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, long sentences, short sentences, etc. All of these poetic techniques really need to be heard in order to be understood, and I think that Voicethread is a brilliant solution for demonstrating these verbal techniques for students and also allowing them to participate in their usage. Jim Hatten showed us the “This I Believe” project on Voicethread, and I remember being very affected by that. The fact that students can comment on each other’s work with their own voices is also very significant to me as a teacher. Although I was reading Thomas’s text, my delivery was uniquely my own, which gives me an odd sense of ownership over that small piece of digital media. My tone, inflection, pitch, and articulation flavors the text with a reading that no one else will be able to reenact. I think this feature would allow some students who normally do not like speaking in class to voice their thoughts in a safe, secure space where their peers can listen without interrupting or intimidating them.
Ultimately, what this project has reiterated to me is that, when using technology in any form, at any point of a project, ALWAYS have a backup plan. Despite my original idea not working out, I actually had a really great time making this piece. It made me think about a text I am very familiar with in a new light and got me excited about poetic forms again. If projects like this can cause me to find joy in failure, I can only imagine what potential it holds for student learning. I would be happy to welcome Voicethread into my classroom any day.
Rick Lybeck
CI 5461
8 March 2011
Reflecting on Starting Over
It is currently four thirty in the morning. I have been trying for the last six hours to scan in, import to my blog, and post a series of comics I have been drawing that depict memorable moments thus far in my student teaching. The reason I chose to draw comics instead of keeping a traditional reflection journal is twofold: for one, I enjoy drawing and looking forward to getting to draw helps me be more diligent about reflecting frequently and relaxes me if I am reflecting on something unpleasant, secondly, because comics utilize humor, I feel that this form will help me process and get over a lot of the uncertainty and unfortunate events that happen at school. And, I have to say, this practice has been working. I’ve become very meticulous about the process of sketching, then drawing, then tracing, and finally inking the comics. I have even purchased a light box to help make tracing a much more fluid process.
Unfortunately, in all my preparation for our final project I forgot to take into account the fact that I have never in my life used a scanner. Nor, did I envision how difficult sizing the comics would be in order to upload them to my blog. I have not given up yet, you will eventually get an e-mail in the coming weeks, loaded with exclamation points, alerting you to the fact that I have finally succeeding in getting the comics up online, but for tonight/this morning, this is not the case. So here, in one reflection, is a depiction of a technological failure of epic proportions as well as an example of technology as the knight in shining armor.
Needless to say, as I stood over our printer/scanner combo, who glared back at me with its glassy display mocking my technological inaptitude with every rearrangement of its ink cartridges, I wanted to cry. But then I thought, is this what it has come to? I have spent the last nine months learning more about technological teaching tools than most practicing teachers have heard of in their entire career and I am crying over a battered, 1999 HP printer?
Realizing how absurd this scene really was, I re-read the final project details and went for a walk to think things over. As the cold, damp air seeped into my nose and down my throat, some of the lines of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood popped into my head. Thomas has a scene in which three drowned sailors come and haunt the blind Captain Cat, and the description of how the sea salted air tastes in their lungs was bouncing around my brain as I trudged through the slushy streets of Seward. Hardly anyone was out, it being three o’clock in the morning on a Thursday, and the opening monologue of the play ran through my mind. I realized that this was the perfect substitute for my comic (no pun intended) catastrophe and headed back home to try out Voicethread. Speaking the lines of the poem I love so much was lovely, and made me forget the frustrations I had been mulling over for the last five hours. I locked myself in our back room, put my face by the computer, and read out loud to myself. The playback feature of Voicethread is also interesting. Hearing your own voice makes you hypercritical of your verbal presentation all of the sudden, which makes me think that this might be a great scaffolding tool for students preparing to give a speech or presentation to the classroom who might be particularly nervous. They can practice go through the speech without stopping and then go back through and listen to where they had difficulty, stumbled, or mumbled.
As I mention in the blog post and in the Voicethread, Dylan Thomas wrote the piece as a “play for voices” and it is most commonly done as a radio play. In thinking about the question of how digital media can best enable a text to be fully realized, I think Voicethread is actually perfect for the play. I would love to bring the text and Voicethread into the classroom and assign scenes to pairs of the students to read as the two voices. I would also like to have the scenes doubled up so different pairs of students could hear how different voices affect the text. The text also has a terrific amount of poetic and language devises such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, long sentences, short sentences, etc. All of these poetic techniques really need to be heard in order to be understood, and I think that Voicethread is a brilliant solution for demonstrating these verbal techniques for students and also allowing them to participate in their usage. Jim Hatten showed us the “This I Believe” project on Voicethread, and I remember being very affected by that. The fact that students can comment on each other’s work with their own voices is also very significant to me as a teacher. Although I was reading Thomas’s text, my delivery was uniquely my own, which gives me an odd sense of ownership over that small piece of digital media. My tone, inflection, pitch, and articulation flavors the text with a reading that no one else will be able to reenact. I think this feature would allow some students who normally do not like speaking in class to voice their thoughts in a safe, secure space where their peers can listen without interrupting or intimidating them.
Ultimately, what this project has reiterated to me is that, when using technology in any form, at any point of a project, ALWAYS have a backup plan. Despite my original idea not working out, I actually had a really great time making this piece. It made me think about a text I am very familiar with in a new light and got me excited about poetic forms again. If projects like this can cause me to find joy in failure, I can only imagine what potential it holds for student learning. I would be happy to welcome Voicethread into my classroom any day.
Voicethread- Just in Case...
I have drawn some comics of some highlights of student teaching thus far, but I am having trouble scanning them to my blog. So, just in case the library scanner does not work tomorrow, here is a Voicethread I made reading my favorite opening sequence in my favorite play, Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas. The play is a play for voices (it is done often as a radio play), so I though Voicethread would be a nice modern homage to what Dylan Thomas originally intended the work to be.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Poetry in Practice
I read both 5 and 6 because I am really interested in hearing what experts have to say about blogging and I am also terrified of the magnitude of a video production project in the classroom. I just feel like it is so time consuming, and I am so new to the form, that I would be unprepared and uncomfortable doing a video project in my class. But, I love the metaphor of video production as composition. I mean, it makes perfect sense once you think about it and would probably do a greater justice to visual learners than any graphic organizer could ever offer. Really allowing students to create, edit, and produce provides both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation because it is a real product (snazzier than a piece of paper) that they get to make. I also prefer the educational possibilities of teaching metaphor through film rather than paper. There is more subtlety and finesse needed in visual metaphors as opposed the more straightforward paper form. Video also allows for instant transfer of knowledge culled in class to practical applications. "Why are we doing this?" Because you need to know this in order to make your video.
I have some questions about the rubric: 1. How can I as a teacher truly tell how "collaborative" the group effort was, 2. To what extent can I glean how much the students actually learned about the poem, and 3. How do I assess how "fun" the project was. I think being more direct with expectations would help foster a stronger rubric for video projects. I do, however, like that a large portion of the assessment is centered around reflection- for many reasons- but particularly because it allows students who struggle with the actual filming can still do well, and comment on or vent their frustrations and what they've learned.
Here is a great site that has all sorts of jumping off points for education based video projects: http://edtech.guhsd.net/video/videoideas.html
I have some questions about the rubric: 1. How can I as a teacher truly tell how "collaborative" the group effort was, 2. To what extent can I glean how much the students actually learned about the poem, and 3. How do I assess how "fun" the project was. I think being more direct with expectations would help foster a stronger rubric for video projects. I do, however, like that a large portion of the assessment is centered around reflection- for many reasons- but particularly because it allows students who struggle with the actual filming can still do well, and comment on or vent their frustrations and what they've learned.
Here is a great site that has all sorts of jumping off points for education based video projects: http://edtech.guhsd.net/video/videoideas.html
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