Miss Archer's Blog: Engl. 493

This book was really interesting and actually something that I discussed with my mentor teacher this morning. He has just got back from his county wide meeting where all the English teachers get together in Whitman county and talk about what they are doing in their classrooms, and he was talking about how the Colfax teacher only required the middle schoolers to read 100 pages a quarter whereas he requires 400 pages a quarter of outside reading to be done for his class. He was questioning me on what I thought and so I pulled this book out of my bag actually and shared it with him. We went over all the statistics of how even just 30 minutes of reading for fun a day can improve a students test scores and their overall achievement in school by overwhelming numbers. So this brought up the question that was also thrown around in the book of why are teachers still teaching to these reading tests and using such a narrow curriculum when we know it isn't working? And why not encourage deeper...

My favorite part of this book were all the strategies that we were given to "fix up" the confusion that students have when reading. The chapter starts out with a kid saying that when he doesn't understand, he just stops reading. This has been something I have done in the past as a student and so I think that it is important that teachers try and use a few of these strategies to help fix the confusion that kids are having. The first strategy asks for students to connect what they are reading to their own life, other texts, or their knowledge of the world. The problem with this is sometimes students are going to need help making those connections. This is where the facilitation of learning from the teacher comes into play. Once the teacher helps the student make those connections, often times then students understand the reading 100xs better and can continue to learn on their own after that connection has been made. The second strategy is to make a prediction. If students...

I did a bit of research on different websites for this weeks assignment, but this was one of my favorites that I came across.  https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/social-justice-resources/ This is a blog post that was created by a woman named Jennifer Gonzalez back in 2016. This website is full of many things, however two things really jumped out at me. The first is her blog that you can navigate to through the site. She has been writing since 2013 about pedagogy and social justice topics and so there are endless amounts of reading that can be done. She also had a really cool place where you could submit your email, and she will email you a weekly email about how to improve your teaching through social justice and pedagogy. I submitted mine, so I am interested to get my first email and see what it is all about.  The second part that really jumped out to me was her specific post that I listed the URL for above. It was titled "A Collection of Resources for Teaching Social ...

One section of this article that really stood out to me was the section that discussed how we teach certain canonical texts. The article listed texts such as Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Macbeth, and Hamlet that were to taught to a diverse group of students through a multicultural lens. They did this by having students pay attention to which characters "were distinguished as cultural". I found this to be an interesting idea simply because I had never thought about putting a multicultural spin on classic texts before. However, this article brings up the idea that ANY text can be read with a multicultural lens if educators encourage it. The other end of this is the idea of educators making sure that they include texts that are written by minorities. When texts like this are included, you can get a better full picture of the writings of that time, especially historical writings, which are largely white male with a little bit of white women sprinkled in. Culturally diverse te...

This was one of the more interesting articles that we have read. In Paulo Freire’s Chapter Two, he explains the difference between educators who use banking educational methods and educators who are humanist revolutionary educators. “Education is suffering from narration sickness”, he writes. What he is referring to is the way many teachers just talk and talk at students and expect them to absorb all the narration that they’re lecturing at them. He continues further down saying, “His task [the teacher’s] is to fill the student with contents of his narration”. Take note on that…”to fill the student with contents of his narration”. Not to help the students to grow in their learning and develop within the content, but to lead them in a direction of memorization. He makes a reference that compares this sort of educating to depositing money in a bank or trash in the trash can. The students become the trash can or the bank account that the teacher deposits his trash and money into. However...