Engl 493 Teaching Literature to Adolescents

For this post I read a few poems by Edgar Allen Poe including one short story named "The Oval Portrait." I don't think that Poe's short stories would be good short stories to share in secondary education. I personally find his work not that interesting. I'm not into stories that are horror related. I'm sure there will be plenty of students who will love horror, but I'm not passionate about it. And I think if I'm not passionate about it, then I shouldn't teach it. I would defiantly recommend it to a few students who like horror and want to get into short story horror from the 1800's. But, yeah, I do find it useful to have students read and figure out what Poe was meaning or to try and figure out another meaning. But as I said before, if I'm not passionate about his work how can I expect students to be passionate. I think there are plenty of other short stories and mediums to use to teach that can be good for me to teach as well as students w...

I read this book when I was in high school. When I read this book in high school, I liked it because the story was intriguing. It was just interesting for me to read about the experience of someone going through those camps. This was the only reason I kept reading. The length of the book also made it less daunting to read. I just remember that this book taught me how the holocaust was like. It was my first introduction to the history of the holocaust, and I was just intrigued. When I reread this novel this time around I was better able to understand and see the horror of the holocaust. I had a clearer picture of what was going on. So of course I still liked the book. It's an interesting view of what he encountered there. The way he lost his innocence at a young age and the way he was seeing his family get sick in the camp made me think about how real and horrific the holocaust really was compared to back in high school. In high school, all of those events were just ideas to me. B...

Into the Wild is a non-fiction book based on an American hiker named Christopher McCandless. He hiked in Alaska. He was later found in an abandon bus. I believe that McCandless left to find enlightenment in his life. This book does go into themes of transcendentalism which I think would be very interesting for high school students. Also there is this theme of wanting to revolutionize your life and put yourself in a position to learn and experience new things. In the book, the man who goes hiking around Alaska just goes by Alex. He leaves his whole life behind. He donated his  savings, burned the rest of his money, and didn't tell anyone from his family where he was going. I could defiantly see this book being taught with 10th graders or 11th graders. This book has the adventure aspect to it. It's a whole documentation of his travels in Alaska and possible ways he died. It gives some history on the area to give a picture of how the environment developed and affected Alex. I th...

After reading the book, I found it to be very interesting to read. Tovani talks about how it's important that students learn why they should read certain texts and how they can go about doing it. I like that she talked about the struggles she had as a teacher when teaching students how to be come better readers. One of the tactics she used to get students' attention is to talk to the students about her own struggles with reading. This helped the students understand that even good readers have to take a step back and look at what they have read. I liked that she talked about the fixes one can do when they have read a text and don't really understand what they have just read. When this happens they should try to make connections between the text and themselves, any prior knowledge, and/or another text. They can make a prediction, they can try to visualize what is happening and retell what they have just read. These are just a few things students can do to help them understa...

So of course the article talked about making good choices for edTPA lesson plans. This was very helpful for me because as I was writing my lesson plans there were plenty of times where I was wondering if I was doing things right or if this was even going to be an effective lesson. But in the article it said to keep in mind time management, students needs, and to also make sure to know your rubric, and that is what I have been doing for the most part with my first lesson plan. I feel like right now the best I can do with my lesson plans is to plan out the whole unit and write out lesson plans for each day. I'm currently not placed at a school, so I don't know the needs of certain students. My goal is just to learn how to best write a lesson plan or a whole unit plan. The guidelines have been very helpful. The sections I struggle with are assessment and incorporating students' voice into the lesson plan. But I think the thing that I think about the most while I was writing ...

For this post I looked a an article that explains how a teacher could teach the core subjects while also integrating high-level thinking about current social issues that students should be well informed in. It says that it's important for students to be well informed about the issues that may direct or indirectly affect their lives after high school. It's important to enforce your own views in these discussions. It's better for students to learn for themselves how to be well informed on an issue and learn how to defend their own position on said issue. The article also said that we as teachers and also school districts need to need to change the way we look at social issues in the classroom. The article talked about how social justice issue have often been excluded from conversations in school. Often times it was because teachers don't value those discussions or don't understand how to go about starting those discussions. It's important for when a teacher want...