The Arts of Teaching

Blogpost: How might you incorporate differentiation and translanguaging strategies in using/teaching one of Tovani’s reading strategies? So, this week we really tried to focus on the ideas of Translanguaging and Differentiated learning. We also kept in mind some of the different reading strategies that Tovani writes about in her book. These two things can go hand in hand and we really should take the time to put them together to help our students learn as best as possible. One of my favorite ideas that I heard recently, from Maria actually, was the idea of having books in the classroom in different languages. Say for example, my class is reading Catcher in the Rye together, and I have one or two emergent bilingual students. If I kept a copy of this in Spanish, or other languages even, I could use this to help my students gain understanding of the reading itself. To grab out the main ideas and to connect them to what I want to teach about the book itself. But of course, just this a...

Blogpost: Find a young adult novel/book or a comic/graphic novel that addresses issues of race/racism, and explain how you might use it in the classroom as part of an antiracist teaching practice. I'm always the person that when asked for a good book for YA I will immediately pick The Hate U Give obviously because of its amazing narrative, and #Blacklivesmatter movement ideas. But I wanted to broaden my horizons for this assignment, and find some other material that could be used to help fight racism in schools. The first book that I came across was a similar one. The book Dear Martin is also a great book to teach parallel to The Hate U Give. Both of these texts are about young Black students who are extremely smart and talented and are racially profiled in one way or another. The best thing about these is that one is in the perspective of a girl who witnesses a friend shot by police, and the other is a boy who is arrested and assumed dangerous by police. Both offer so...

Personally, when thinking about a really good lesson that would get me involved and learning, I think that I really need something very independent . Surprising right? I know! I actually find that I really do not enjoy group work at all. Mostly I always get paired with students who do little to nothing, and I end up just doing most, if not all, of the work by myself. This is something that I would like to keep in mind for my future students, because I know what it's like to get the crappy end of the stick. On the teaching side of things, I like to think that a good lesson is something that really grabs my students attention. Something that they all want to get involved in, and have a bit of fun with while they are working on it. The perfect lesson has the ability to teach students a lesson without them even knowing it's happening. On the other had, it MUST be organized. I can not stand when there are all sorts of things happening and I can't control any of the things ...

So... I have been struggling to write this post for two days now, and I am finally just going to put it out there with what I've been thinking. Technology and racism... why was it so hard for me to find things to use? Well, that's the problem isn't it? I scoured the internet looking for fun activities to get my students involved in and get the racism conversation going, but guess what? There really isn't much. After looking at everyones blog posts I noticed this was a problem, because everyone kind of has the same activities up. Stuff like: 1. Labelling the photo or asking questions about what the inherent message is. This picture, along with (unfortunately) tons of others, sparks a whole conversation about racism. Asking our students the simplest of questions can get some really deep thinking going. What is going on in this picture? Who is in this picture? Why was it taken? Etc. It's a great conversation starter, but is it enough? Of course not! 2. Anoth...

When thinking about the idea of critical literature, the first thing that came to mind for me was the idea of pop culture, and how we could possibly use it to help students gain a better understanding of the world that surrounds them. Social media, the news, current TV shows; they all have these issues intwined in them. Race, class, gender, and so many other things can be pulled out of these if you just take the time to look a little harder at them.  So, upon looking for some cool ideas for our students I found this article,  Fostering Critical Literacy Through Popular Culture , that highlights a few ideas that we could use with our students. One of the main ideas of this article, written by high school English teacher Kathleen Colantonio-Yurko, is that we can take the TV shows our students are watching, like    black-ish for example, and use it to ask questions about things like race, gender, inequality, and so on. As a teacher, pick a specific episode,...

Originally, I started this blog for a writing course. Now I have moved on into my practicum course for teaching and will be continuing this semester with my blog, which will be focused more towards reading. For our first assignment we were given this template and asked to think about the things that were important to us... I am a teacher who stands up for JUSTICE against THE MAN, who is in favor of SILENCE against FREE SPEECH, who is a supporter of DEMOCRACY against TYRANNY, and who is a defender of ALL PEOPLE against RACISM AND SEXISM. I am a teacher who favors the permanent struggle against HATRED and against WAR. I am a teacher who rejects POVERTY, because it is responsible for HEARTBREAK. I am a teacher full of LOVE, in spite of THE DEVASTATION  I am a teacher who refuses TO BE SILENT. I am a teacher proud of WHO I AM. If I do not struggle for MY STUDENTS, then I will no longer be A TEACHER.