Uncle Sandy

The local newspaper printed an article when my grandma passed away, the author wrote about my grandma's incredible life and told of her passing to thousands of people. She was an amazing woman and loved by many people. My mom told me stories from her childhood about her three sisters and two brothers. I recently came across a document in a public domain that listed a third brother. I had never heard of my Uncle Sandy. My mom denied the idea of a third brother or a secret family. The obituary that had been written at the time of my grandma’s death had one small mistake; here was a comma in the place of a semicolon. This small error in the obituary has given my mom a third brother: Dave, Walter, and Sandy.  Obituaries often say who the survivors of the deceased are with their hometowns listed. Uncle Dave lives in Sandy, a suburb of Salt Lake City but because of the typo I now have an Uncle Sandy listed as my mom's brother. When I first discovered this I almost believed that maybe there really is an Uncle Sandy that I've never met or was so rotten they never spoke of him. Just imagine the secret I thought I discovered.

Writing is important, we are adding to history when we write or create. We need to be accurate and that includes the little things including punctuation. The NES text makes it seem so simple, if we could only remember all the rules. They really are simple and easy to forget.

As teachers, we will all have at least one student who will ask why they have to learn grammar and punctuation because the student might not want to be a writer, but everyone writes especially with social media being such a big deal. You want to say what you mean or you might end up splitting an inheritance with Uncle Sandy, whoever he is.

Visual Literacy Handout

Visual Literacy - Graphic Canon Volume 2 

"A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."
                                                                                                                                        - Mark Twain

What? This heavy book is filled with snippets of graphic versions of the classics that we have all had the privilege of reading: Edgar Allen Poe, The Scarlet Letter, Oliver Twist, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Picture of Dorian Gray, and Huckleberry Finn. The book shows a sample of what is out there in the classics transformed to graphics.

Why? I chose this text because I was looking for interesting ways to teach classic novels and get students excited about seeing them in new ways. More specifically Huckleberry Finn because it is a story that we’ve all read and can remember the torture of reading this. Learning the classics can be super annoying as a teenager, but it is still a very important part of culture and this culture educates you and broadens your mind. As outdated as these novels may seem to our students, they teach timeless lessons that still apply today.

How? Ways to use the Graphic Canon to inspire…

1.      I think it would be fun to have students in a class each take a chapter or two and transform it into a simple graphic novel or scene and create a complete graphic novel unique to each class.

2.      The graphics and simple text of the graphic novel can help simplify the story and help draw emotion that may otherwise get lost in our literary application. Pictures help with textual understanding.

3.      I would love to have my class read both the graphic novel version and the original version and do a comparison of the texts. Different things will stand out in each version. The graphic novel will miss details of the original and the graphic novel can offer understanding that was overlooked by the reader in the original text.

 Why not? Problems that I can see arising with creating a classroom graphic novel: not everyone is artistic and not everyone does their homework. Other problems could be the “Why? Why do we have to read this old book?” There are great articles on the web about the “why”. It’d be worth a google (starting here).

Visual Literacy: Applied English

Visual Literacy is a lot more than I thought it was going to be. Initially I was thinking about Graphic Novels but the textbook reading taught me more on this topic and how it applies to our everyday lives. We are continuously exposed to Visual Literacy and we don’t pause to think about it as literature: billboards on the side of the road, advertisements on television, and the menu with beautiful photographs of the food  at your favorite restaurant.

I remember making commercials for student-invented products and campaigns for imaginary candidates in various classes as a child and not knowing that I was creating literature or even visual literature. It was fun and almost felt nonsensical but this is one direction that literature allows us to go.

Visual Literature had limited information on CCSS and that could possibly be due to the fact that visual literature seems like something you might learn in a business class or an art class. This is important for English Classes to be able to offer this form of education because it shows application of the subject. Most students want to know how a school subject applies to the big picture of real life. With visual literacy, the students can see why taking an English class might be important to someone who already speaks the language or doesn’t want to major in English; they can now see that English Class is more than just reading Shakespeare.

I also like the Graphic Novel part of this subject. People learn in different ways and I really like the idea of Graphic Novels to switch up the learning process. I also wonder if it can teach body language for learning social skills. It’s a strange thought but instead of reading how people feel, students would see how people feel with body language expressed in the graphic novel; a skill that everyone can benefit from or improve on.

Do you hear what I hear? Nope, because you're not listening.

Two summers ago, we went to a hypnotist show and my twelve-year-old daughter went on stage to be hypnotized. This experience revealed an interesting truth about my daughter: she simply doesn’t listen. She was hypnotized, no doubt about it, but she didn’t do everything the hypnotist suggested. If there was too much going on or the instructions were too long, she would get confused and not do anything. She was like a zombie standing on the stage in a daze. The hypnotist would sometimes have to put his hand on her shoulder to get her to listen. Sooo does her inability to listen explain why I have to tell her over and over again to clean her room? Probably not but we’ll just roll with it.

This same daughter also takes forever to answer a simple question. I can ask her what she wants for breakfast and it takes her forever to answer. It used to feel like a long awkward pause until I realized she was seriously considering the question. Now I am learning that brief silences are good so that information gets processed. The textbook teaches us to pause before responding and to comment on the previous speaker first. This keeps us engaged in the conversation instead of focusing on our response.

I am a mean mom. When we go on a road trip, we listen to books instead of watch movies. My kids get excited about the books, including my “super cool” son. I really liked that the textbook mentions that students like to listen to poetry, books, and podcasts. These are important listening opportunities. 

The text also suggests having the students retell the story.

Communication is much more than listening and speaking. According to the textbook, body language is a form of communication. Before we speak to people we automatically assess their body language and what it is telling us and to consciously aware of what we are saying with our own body language.

Group Discussions

“To teach is to learn twice over.” – Joseph Joubert 

”I am not a teacher, but an awakener.” – Robert Frost

On Sundays I teach a small class of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls and have run into a problem with having group discussions. They don't know how to take turns when speaking and will speak over each other. It has blown my mind that theses sweet girls are unable to have a discussion where everyone gets to speak. Then I noticed that my own children have those same tendencies which is embarrassing for me to admit as a mother. I thought I was raising polite children. Bwahaha. The joke is on me.

Then I read this article:   http://webshare.northseattle.edu/Sustainability_in_Healthcare/Discussion_as_a_Way_of_Teaching%20INC-Learning%20Circles.pdf and realized the necessity of  setting ground rules for a healthy discussion and a positive experience.This article offers suggestions and guidelines to keep your discussions on track and suggests simple rules for students to remind them to be courteous to each other. When the guidelines and ideas recommended by this article are followed everyone gets involved and included in the conversation and learning process.

Group discussions have been a teaching tool in Secondary Education classrooms for years; students either hate or love these opportunities, however these discussions are an excellent way for students to learn. Not only do they learn content but they will find themselves teaching content and exploring new ideas with their peers, thus elevating their level of understanding. They also learn to converse peacefully amongst each other.

Next time I teach the group of young girls on Sunday, I will apply the methods suggested in this reading. It is great practice for me and getting my teaching skills moving in the right direction.

Cultural Learning

In the article Culture Distance and Cultural Dimensions in Diverse ELT Environments: A Quantitative Investigation, Dr. Margaret Lieb shares some amazing statistics about immigration. Just the increasing number of immigrants is fascinating: from 173 million transnational migrants in the year 2000 to 258 million in 2017. She compares the melting pot that exists in the United Kingdom to what is now occurring in Japan. To remain an affluent nation, Japan encourages international mindedness and multicultural work environments which I think we could all use a little more of this in our lives.

Lieb has taught in Ireland, Japan, and the U.S. and uses those experiences to help guide her research. She has observed and researched the various learning styles of the different cultures. One of Lieb's sources suggested that people raised in the same area will "share a set of value orientations" whereas people from "different ethnic, religious, or culture backgrounds" do not. It never occurred to me that these parameters could affect learning styles but it makes sense as one begins to understand more about the culture. I am impressed that Lieb thought to make this correlation.

I've never  thought about the possibility of Japan having immigrant communities and this paper opened my eyes to that possibility. I've lived abroad and have seen these immigrant communities but never thought they would exist in the Eastern World. (I am so naive. Don't judge me.) It amazes  me how people with similar cultures manage to find each other in large cities in foreign countries. I can honestly say that every large city I have visited has its own socially segregated racial communities. Teaching in such schools adds a level of difficulty and understanding and our world continues in this direction. It is exciting to live in a world full of variety and cultures.