Our Violent Cases.

I had a blast teaching this book to the class and it seemed like most of the activities went over really well. I think my main problem was that at times I move to fast and I was reaching over the heads of some people, which can be frustrating. Our beginning exercise did a lot to show the other students how the images and pictures shown in a comic book can contribute to the meaning of it, and I think we managed to spur some really great conversations in our first half.

I think the main thing I tried to do was make sure I was actually helping and moderating during the times when we just had people working in groups, and that seemed to work well. Hopefully I can get better with that for my actual teaching. I thought Cassie's activity on having us all make comics was fantastic and I had a lot of fun doing it. It just goes to show how creative some people can be. I was also surprised by the numbers Cassie pulled out at the end, because I hadn't heard them before either. I know from my own experience that graphic novels can do a lot to help kids read, and I think that we were able to show our fellow students some of the magic of it.

I wanted to comment to the different students who were frustrated because the book didn't "go" anywhere. This may be a very sexist thing of me to say, I have no idea, but in my experience this is a reaction that in the classroom you're going to see from a lot of boys. It has to do with the way most of us are raised(I'm talking about the basic ways girls and boys are taught to behave differently), and boys are going to want there to be some greater purpose, some end or conclusion. What I'm saying is that there's a difference between works that are dialog and experience driven and works that are pro/antagonist and conflict driven. I think the point I'm trying to make here is that it's important for all of us, boys and girls, to break out of the different ideas or expectations we have for a book. Actually, I'm not sure I got across any of the point I was trying to make, but what the heck, I'll leave this bit in here just in case someone gets it.

The Bell Jar

I was actually surprised by how much I liked this book. After reading some other feminist literature I assumed it would be very dry and with not much happening, and I felt that the book actually moved along at a good pace and Sylvia Plath was very engaging as a writer.

It was a good idea for the group to spend a lot of time talking about the life of Sylvia Plath because of how obviously autobiographical the book was. I liked the timeline where we all had to read different things about her life in order and the place them up on the board. It gave a good point of reference for the rest of the lesson. I'm partial to the poem Daddy as well so I liked the part where we covered that poem.

I think one of the dangers for us as we go into our classrooms is the fact that there's a slight difference between "teaching" and "presenting", and sometimes it's hard to break away from the presenting we've been doing all our lives into something else. This group did a good job teaching, and a lot of the time I was really entertained by the discussions they brought to the table, but at times I felt as if I was just being presented material. And hey, that might be the point, because they are presenting to us how we ourselves can teach this book, it's just a thing to watch out for in the future when teaching actual students. Like I said, overall I really enjoyed this book and I really enjoyed the group teach based on it.

Webb Book

The Webb book was like the Appleman book except political and not quite as good. I enjoyed some of things he had to say about teaching things culturally, but I really didn't like the fact that most of the classes he focused on were college classrooms and that he wanted us to be teaching these kinds of things all semester. I just think it's too much, and I think there is a limit to how much you can put opinions into a classroom. Actually, now that I write that I realize that it's a really important point. It's fine and it's actually good to reveal your opinion to your classroom, but you can't be doing it all the time, and there is such a thing has learning just for the joy of learning something academic, without attaching a bunch of real world connotations to it.

I think the two cultural things I liked were using homelessness to talk about Marxism and using feminist literature in the classroom. It's entertaining to me that both of these different topics can make different parts of the class uncomfortable depending on who is the majority group in question, and it would be fun to draw connections between the two and how minority groups function as a whole.

Appleman Book

I've mentioned some of things I liked about Applemen already several times, so it shouldn't be to hard to go over them. The main thing I liked about Appleman was the fact that it gave me a very clear idea of some of the ways I could teach a more advanced class. It goes in a direction almost entirely opposite from Wilhelm's book and for that I'm grateful. It's like between these two books we were able to see bits of the entire spectrum of reading instruction, and that's just fantastic.

I think the main thing I'll be doing with Appleman in the classroom is using some of the critical theories she talks about to enhance the readings of certain books. I don't think I'm ever going to have a classroom where the entire class will be focused only on critical theories, and I really liked the fact that even Appleman said that you don't have to use them all the time, that it's ok to teach the critical theory in spurts, and her admission that not every critical theory works for every text. I think as a teacher, teaching literature, I'm going to have a great time using critical theory and my own passion for reading to get the students entertained and engaged in the reading material. I don't think there are any chapters in this book I would skip, but I think there should be some added reading material from someone who gives a better explanation of what deconstructionism is.

Wilhem Book

I thought when reading the different books for this semester that it was a great thing for us to have started with Wilhelm, because in a lot of ways it seems like a much more basic book than the other two, but it's not any less beneficial. For me Wilhelm was hugely helpful in seeing into exactly the kinds of problems students are having when they read, which is huge because it's not really something I've ever experienced. Not only was I able to read the different accounts Wilhelm gave about these struggling students, but I was also able to take those readings and use them to better understand the things my little brother is struggling with in his reading.
I think for using it in class I'm going to try and keep in mind all the different movement and picture oriented activities that Wilhelm laid out for us, and hopefully I'll actually get to use some of them next semester. It's just so damn fascinating to me that some of these students just didn't think reading was interesting because they couldn't bring the things they knew about the world into their reading. Also, I think out of the three books we read the student responses from this book were the most genuine, and that really helped in the enjoyment of reading it. Because of how much I liked reading the book I don't think it should really be taught any differently, and I hope it's used in future classrooms because I really think it helped me a lot.

Webb Chapter 7

While I still felt the parts talking about Deconstructionism were a little vague, I liked this chapter and I thought the discourse on Poststructuralism was very interesting. Once again I couldn't help feeling as though I should be dropping the book and picking up some of the ones he was talking about, but I know that when I do get around to reading them I'll have a good resource with Webb to work out of.

**Adding more to this later, classtime D:

Webb Chapter 4

Although I disagree that things have been worse with the youth of the country recently, it's true that it's important to address the violence that some students have to deal with, and important that your more privileged students know about that world and how privileged they really are. It did seem that the majority of the chapter was dedicated towards rationalizing why the subject is needed, but the books Webb suggest and the different lessons mentioned to interest me.

I think the first thing I'm going to need to do before I become an English teacher is to read some more of the books mentioned in these books, I mean, I've never even heard of Native Son and there are so many High School oriented books I've simply never read. From the description of it, I think it would be a good book to teach in a High School classroom. I'm also intrigued by the idea of teaching the works of Martin Luther King Jr. There are so many things that King wrote that simply aren't taught in schools, and most of his work actually isn't about race at all but is about war and how war functions mainly as a way to sabotage the upward mobility of the lowest and the poorest.

It's also interesting to note that Webb ties MultiCulturalism so closely into his chapter about gang violence, and it's no coincidence. Because of the ways that the government and people have screwed minorities in the past their Socio-Economic status' to this day are completely borked for the most part, and I think that's where books like Native Son come in to talk about those kinds of things.