Charter School Job Fair

Usually I spend my Saturday mornings sleeping in, catching up on the lack of sleep from the week, but this morning I woke up bright and early to attend the MAPSA charter school job fair in Southfield. My first reaction to it would be WOW! There were so many people there (more than I ever expected). The lines for each table were winding around the room, which made it hard to figure out what lines to even stand in. There were significantly more people there than there were at the University of Michigan job fair which was interesting to me. Although I got some positive feedback at it, the amount of people there made the job search process seem even more daunting. Granted, there were people there for elementary education as well, but the experience made it very clear how competitive the job search is going to be. I do think that we will stand out from MAC and a full year of student teaching, but we will see! Happy job searching to my fellow MACers :)

trying to teach the skills or the literature?

The topic of this blog post is something that we have talked about a lot in my field instruction, but I don't think that t I fully understood the controversy until I began teaching the Odyssey to my ninth graders. The Odyssey is obviously a very difficult text with very formal diction, and although I think that it has been going well in my class, I leave school each day wondering if it would be more beneficial to my students to teach a different text. We spend most of our time in class covering the plot, and spend very little time moving beyond the text. I am not saying that working just on the plot is a loss, as the students are working on a lot of reading strategies, but I would also like to be teaching my students analytical skills. Would it be more helpful to use a text that we could spend less time spent on issues of plot? I can however see the other side of the argument in that the Odyssey, like many classic texts, is referenced throughout literature and our culture. I do not want my students to be disadvantaged because they did not learn the Odyssey in 9th grade like most students do. I really am struggling with this issue....I guess this something that I will have to work through in my teaching career.

Technology Beyond the Overhead

Lately my mentor and I and some of her colleagues have had conversations regarding technology in our classroom. I think it is safe to say that we are behind most classrooms in the building, with the extend of our technology use being the overhead. We have a TV in our room that is supposed to connect to the computer, but we usually have difficulty getting it to work correctly. The only piece of "technology" we use regularly is the overhead, which in this day and age is not considered new technology anymore(I think my parents had those in the classroom when they were in school). Needless to say, our classroom needs to try to catch up, but how? The English department at Romulus does not have any projectors, so to use one would require borrowing it and setting it up every time, which ends up being a hassle when there is only five minutes between class periods. I suppose we could use cell phones for polling, but the kids would not be able to see the results besides on my mentor's computer screen, which takes away a lot of the excitement of it. The other day I had them use Googlelit trips, but that was not in our actual classroom; we had to go to the computer lab which is not always easy to get time to use. How can we catch up? I do not want to put my students at a disadvantage because of the lack of technology in our curriculum.

Liveblogging at MACUL

Reflection on Live Blogging

My live blogging experience of Gossip Girl did not go as I had hoped for, probably because no one joined me for it. I figure that that could have happened for two reasons, the first being that school is starting to get a little bit crazy right now and people do not have as much time to spare to chat about Gossip Girl as they would have maybe earlier in the semester. The second thing is that I did not pick a topic that appealed to a lot of people(shocking to me as a Gossip Girl fan!). I luckily had a great experience later in the week in another MACers live blog on the Office, where about ten of us showed up. It was a fantastic way to chat with each other while watching the same thing.
My experienced thus far with live blogging got me thinking on the ways that it could be used for educational purposes. I think a really fun activity for a class would be to live blog something that pertained to the curriculum, so perhaps if we had just talked about persuasive writing and speeches, we could watch a presidential speech at home and have a live discussion about how it relates to the class. Since Romeo and Juliet is on my mind as I plan my unit, the class could have a live blog taking on a perspective of a character from the play in reaction to something(I am not sure what at this point). I also think it could be a great way to interact with other educators on what is going on in their classrooms. I wonder what other positive ways I could come up with to implement live blogging into my curriculum in the future.

Video Games for the English Classroom

After our point counter point presentation last week I got to thinking about the use of video games in my own classroom. I began to do a little searching on the internet of types of games for the English classroom, and most of what I found was for the ESL student. Although I do not know of many games at this point, I do not see a problem with using them if they are available. I am always trying to think of creative ways to teach the material, and if video games get the students interested then why not implement them. A couple of weeks ago we took our kids to the computer lab to take the STAR reading test. After they were done the students went to freerice.com to wait for the other students to complete the test. On the site there was a game where the kids had to pick what the definition of a word was, and if they were correct 10 grains of rice appeared on the screen for donation. The kids got really into it and kept calling me over to see how much rice was in their bowls. They didn't even realize they were expanding their vocabulary at the same time! Hopefully through research I can find some more interactive sites and games so that I can expand my instruction.