Monday, August 30, 2010
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Monday, April 19, 2010
David Copperfield
- From the same generation as Bronte, and his pen name was "Boz"
- Dickens's personal history was very similar to David's: he labored as a boy, his dad was imprisoned for debt, and he was a self-made man
- Serialization: the book was published as three chapters a month, and the serialization resulted in lots of characters; it also allowed Dickens to respond to his readers' responses
- To help his readers remember the characters from month to month, Dickens created character driven "types": Micawber said "in short" often, Uriah was famous for his "umbleness," and Gummidge classified herself as a "lone lorn creature"
- Dickens was one of the greatest writers of realism because he encompassed the whole world. He plays off of fears and values of the time period to help readers relate. Some of these characters are larger than life, like Peggotty and her buttons. This inflation is similar to the characters in "The Office"
- It's a bildungsroman like Harry Potter; the protagonist is destitute, the chosen one, and is friendless in his own home
- Firmness=Murdstones enforce firmness of character, and david has to grow up a lot; similar to Jane Eyre because the childhood trauma affected David a lot (in this novel, David goes away to school branded with the placard denouncing his behavior, and in Jane Eyre, Jane goes to school with the fear that no one will like her because her aunt branded her as a bad child)
- Class=overcoming class status; doesn't matter what class you're from, you can still be very generous; men are expected to be gentlemen (educated, foppish, effortless), and for some men, like Steerforth, this comes naturally, but for Micawber it is entirely unnatural
- Gender=Betsey Trotwood always compares David to his imaginary sister; men are often dominated by women, and the men fulfill stereotypes (fool, ass, crazy); the women are strong but very eccentric, and they serve as vehicles for emotion
- Domesticity=Anges is the "angel in the house," the domestic and sensible housewife
- Fallen woman=very popular in Victorian period; these women wanted to increase their statuses; Emily runs off with Steerforth because he's attractive, and she is subsequently ruined; Steerforth is the rake, and Ham is the good guy stereotype
- Self-improvement=hard-work doesn't always mean success, and this was a radical idea for Dickens's time; David tries to improve Dora, and Murdstones try to improve David's mother
- Idealized love=David idealizes every woman he falls for, including Agnes; he makes her into a tool of his own self-improvement
- Miss Dartle is marked by her scar, and she represents a fallen woman
- Dora is like a fairy (similar to Jane Eyre), and David gets rid of her body and idealizes her
- Miss Mowcher says David should not disregard someone for his or her physical defects
- Uriah Heep writhes, and he's ugly and slimy; he's trying to climb the social ladder, and perhaps Dickens is insinuating that people shouldn't try to escape their class
- David is a symbol of immaturity, and his young face and his nickname, Daisy, further this image
- Martha is connected to the river because it comes innocently from the country and becomes polluted in the city
- Dora's body becomes a martyr
- Steerforth's mother becomes just a moaning shell
- Simplicity=Traddles, despite becoming successful, remains humble and simple
- Strong moral character and sincerity/frankness
- Character/personality vs status
- Family (blood ties) - domesticity (simplicity)
- New beginnings=Micawber goes to Australia (where criminals are sent)
- Dickens emphasizes emotional intensity through characters. Micawber loses his senses when he accuses Uriah Heep, and his face turns purple. Miss Dartle loses her temper when Steerforth dies, and she accuses the mother. What does this say about society when self-control is so valued? When some of the upper class can't express their emotions in the same way that the lower class can, their emotions spurt out as super intense.
- Women faint a lot in the novel, and that's a comedic tool that Dickens uses, just like Peggotty's buttons popping off and Uriah's writhing. It's also important to note that Dickens isn't very familiar with the female perspective, and he doesn't do a great job of expressing their internal emotions.
- At each stage of David's life, Dickens brings in characters in situations similar to David's to provide context
ESL tips
- American society values some things that make communication with other cultures difficult. Individualism and equality are valued in the US, and sometimes they are valued in other countries, but that isn't the case always. Closely related to these values is competition: Americans rank themselves in comparison to others all the time, and that can make multicultural experiences more difficult because we might not appreciate all the opinions or viewpoints of another culture.
- A bad way to teach ELLs: have them do worksheets that aren't related to each other and don't help the children develop communication skills. A good way to teach ELLs: have them discuss something like a field trip together as a class, and make notes on a flip chart with words that describe the trip. The students can then split up and write about their experience, and they can refer to the chart if they need to.
- ELLs and really any English learner benefits from speaking and writing. A great exercise for an ESL class or a Lit class is having the students write stories every day when they come in, and then they share the stories later in class. Or have them predict newspaper headlines, and then they can comb through the newspaper to find those headlines. When there's a new ELL, assign a buddy to them every week, someone who can help them understand what is going on in class.
- Tests are great assessments, but they don't help students learn very much
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Data Analysis Tasks
Other data analysis tools: tinkerplot, wordle.com, and Go!Motion
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Subbing in Monroe County Schools
I subbed today at Templeton Elementary in a sixth grade classroom. I jotted down notes about what I saw during the class. I came in after lunch and recess, and so the first thing that was being dealt with was the “incident” at recess. One of the troublemakers of the class was explaining to another teacher about a black kid with whom he got into a fight. He said the boy was a “gangsta getting up in my face.” I was a little disturbed by having to somewhat deal with a fight only two minutes into class, even though I didn’t directly deal with the problem. I realized quickly that it was a low-achieving class, and the student teacher in charge affirmed this. It was really pretty diverse; there was an African-American kid, an Asian kid, and two Latino kids, and they all seemed well liked by their classmates. The class in general seemed very accepting and comfortable with one another. The class was also primarily male (maybe three girls?), and it was a very loud and raucous class.
I wanted to comment actually less on racial issues but on tracking. The student teacher explained to me how NCLB was affecting her classroom. She said that they primarily taught English and Math, and there was a big emphasis on testing. There was very little focus on science and social studies, and she said that she hadn’t taught really any science in a few weeks. I just can’t believe that. If America is so concerned with pushing our students to be real competitors, it has to be about more than taking the math and English tests. These kids aren’t learning anything that will help them in the global world, and they are falling behind in those subjects. I just can’t believe that our grand solution to bad schools is to focus the content so much on testing within Math and English. It’s ridiculous. And the strategies to teach were really aimed at low-achieving students and didn’t help the students stretch themselves at all. The student teacher read to them while they drew or slept, and the rest of class time was spent playing an anagram game. So all these kids learn about is English and Math, and all they do is draw, sleep, do skits, and play games. Where is the real learning? When do these kids actually get to be creative? It’s just stupid.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Communication Tools
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Poe
- Gothic and horror themes, suspense, dejection, melancholy
- Psychological illnesses
- Madness: Usher has schizophrenia or split personality
- Frontier gothic: confusion in the night, constricted society, huge mansion
- Symbol of crumbling mansion, which seems to have its own sentience (eye-like windows, perceive things)
- Beautiful young woman dies
- Plenty of symbolism in mansion, status of minds, etc. Also foreshadowing through pink color of Madeline's cheeks
- Evident psychological illnesses, hallucinations
- Blurred barriers
- We doubt the reliability of the narrator
- Liminal space once again of love and death
- The beautiful woman dies a violent, horrible death, just like "Usher." Is this to create a more heart-wrenching ending or is a comment on the beautiful and prized things in life?
- Use of sounds to build suspense: from silent and still to shrieks, screams, and groans; beating heart and ringing; only he hears the heart beating
- Obsession with the eye similar to the obsession of the narrator in "Berenice" to teeth
- Affliction of the nerves
- Relation of insanity and morality
- Very intense and long descriptions of paranoia, fear, guilt, horror, and more; Poe's gift is his description of emotion and setting
- Undermining of rationalism in American Gothic: perversity of the self, whether it is acknowledged or not
- Punishment within religion and American Gothic; punishment isn't always justified, although this narrator attempts to; grotesque punishment
- Major theme within American gothic is the murderer's fixation: very concerned with the here and now as opposed to higher reason
- Because the narrator's motive can't be ascribed to logic or reason, it blatantly defies the themes of reason and rationalism in this era
- Ambiguity is another characteristic of American Gothic literature: what happens to our narrator? How do the police react to his outburst?
- Comedic irony: insistence on rationality and attention to detail
- Evil eye: also references to this in Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu faiths as cause for unexplained illnesses or misfortunes; to counteract such misfortune, extraction and distraction serve to dissolve the evil
Poems: Browning, Rossetti, and Dickinson
- Juxtaposition of love and pain
- Receive love based on self-worth
- Romantic love, outward expression, love can be clumsy
- Death, love, and the liminal space between them
- Who is this "someone"? Is it God, herself, or a man?
- Grace can take away our pain; very religious undertones
- Lots of self loathing and anger
- Similar themes as found in Paul's letter to the Romans
- Self-worth
- In "Ecstatic" Dickinson alleges that happiness is bittersweet; you can't know happiness without some pain, which is what Austen alleges in Persuasion
- Little structure
- Truth is ambiguous and can be many things
Persuasion response
- Upward class movement: juxtaposition of lower class men who are amiable and caring to upper class men (Elliots) who are vain and arrogant
- Beauty: Anne versus Elizabeth
- Pride
- Assumptions that lead to pain or embarrassment
- Persuasion v autonomy
- Confusion is huge throughout the novel; Wentworth and Anne are confused regarding each other; Elliot trying to win Anne; internal struggle, too
- Humor: Mary and Sir Walter are hugely funny; they are foil to the complicated arena of Wentworth and Anne, and they serve many similar functions as the comedic foils in Shakespearean plays
- Suppressed emotions
- Women in this period are supposed to be fragile; they can't express anger, but boys can express anger if it is in a directed arena; they are considered weak
- Passionate and intense feeling are only acceptable if they serve the family=family unity is extremely important, as Anne proves through her fidelity to her family's happiness
- Within novels, emotions are never really conquered because there would be no rebellion and no room for growth
- The healthy way for a young man to focus his anger was through politics or work; Wentworth proves this by immersing himself in the navy
- 3 most threatening emotions: anger, fear, and jealously. Anne experiences some of these, but she doesn't allow them to rule her, making her the picture of emotional perfection in the Victorian Era.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Multicultural strategies of Teaching
- Create multicultural clubs
- Bring student experiences into lessons
- Travel
- Focus on guided learning rather than being the popular teacher
- Keep learning and reeducating yourself: "The real purpose of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things"
- Reflection!!!!
- Challenge harassment
- Allow for opportunities to speak and write about multiculturalism
- Cultivate student esteem and responsibility
- Help students understand peer pressure
- Mentor
- Respect on both sides
- Socially engaged students/citizens
- Use simulation and role-playing
- Need to be intentional
- Struggle for students
- Challenge student assumption and be aware of our own attitudes
- Take risks
- Validate students' culture and experiences
- Remain open to new perspectives
- Humility, flexibility, courage
- Feedback is important--develop accountability groups with the staff
- Education should shake up our world views
- Be aware of silencing
- Hold students to high expectations
- Be open and frank with students
Overwhelmed
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
"Reading Jane Eyre" by Smith
Benito Cereno
- worked on a ship; was a whaler; lived with cannibals for a while
- when "Benito Cereno" was published, the Civil War was pretty much inevitable
Themes
- human depravity, sea adventure, slavery, gothic
- epistemology: how do we know what we know? (senses, reason, emotion)
Symbols
- San Dominick=self-contained universe, Oatum-Pickers
- Bachelor's Delight=success/prosperity, similar to Bachelor in Moby Dick, very male-dominated world
- Don Benito=means blessed
- Captain Delano=named after a Hebrew general, served usurper Absalom
- White skeleton
- Knot=symbol of Delano's struggle to understand; could also be opportunity to reach out to Delano through a coded message
- Key in the padlock=white supreme race holds key but now in chains and it's inverted; slave owners now slaves themselves
- Spanish flag around neck during shaving=Delano sees it as colorful decoration, but it's meant to lower the flag because it's now a rag
Notes
- rise of the U.S. vs. Spain
- it was a real event; slavery was considered corrupt at this point
- stance on slavery as a crippling state
- Babo isn't stereotypical slave: he's intelligent and small
- is Melville critical of slavery? He leaves Babo dignified in death
- Amasa is a fool - he's ignorant and naive
- Melville seems to be very against slavery
- are Delano's coughing fits on purpose? are they a cover-up or do they serve to distract when Delano gets too close?
- did Delano remain ignorant because he didn't know what to do with the knowledge, because he couldn't face the cruelty, or to protect himself physically?
- contemporary examples of skewed frame of reference: Bush (enforced democracy); Le Mun Wah's documentary on racism and white supremacy and naivete; creationism v evolution
- "Follow your leader"=does it mean that Benito was meant to follow Babo (in death) or Aranja (who was literally placed on the front of the ship); also, Civil war propaganda
- also like Orwell's 1984=words are all inverted, have double meanings
- told from Delano's perspective as opposed to Babo's because it's a mystery; also told from black slave's perspective which would not have been published then; furthermore, mysteries are all the rage during this time (Poe, Bronte)
- get main story from a deposition which is odd
- compared to Uncle Tom's Cabin (in which the lead black is docile), this slave narrative enjoyed strikingly less popularity, probably because the blacks revolted
- Babo's character=changes throughout novel; starts out sugary and false; are we sposed to be rooting for him, and is he the hero; shouldn't Babo have understood the evils of slavery
- inversion of slavery=this slavery was disguised whereas in the south the more slaves you had the richer you were deemed
- Babo's slaes had someone to rescue them; people cared about their lives and rights
The good and bad of technology
- engaging and fun
Drawbacks:
- too advanced
- access
- preference
- malfunctions
- can hurt development in a certain aspect of student learning (spelling)
Affects three E's:
- enhancing because allows more development of a topic
- efficient if teacher knows what they're doing
Examples of three E's:
- digital story
- blogs
- webquest
- prezi/powerpoint (with action buttons!)
Helpful hints:
- when you are going to have students work on a computer, check ahead of time to make sure technology works
- when using powerpoint, you can create an action button by right clicking on a shape, select hyperlink, and click the page you want it to refer back to
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Jane Eyre discussion
Another interesting portion of this section is its ties to religion. Religion is discussed earlier in the novel with Helen and Brocklehurst, but here we see Jane's spirituality in contrast to St. John's orthodox religous beliefs. Jane seems to really chafe against his rigidity, and we are given to wonder whether Bronte feels the same. Does she agree that spirituality should be a more personal experience that isn't so tied up in duty and the church? She is at least implying that St. John's religious beliefs prevent him from really loving anyone because he's so single-mindedly focused on God.
Instead of love, St. John advocates utilitarianism, which proposes that the greatest good in this world does the most good for the most people. This is a more Eastern idea typically, and also a more Orthodox idea, whereas modern Western thought advocates the rights of the individual. St. John's emotions, in this context, seem to be further critiqued. His motives, always pure, are never about love.
The love between Jane and Rochester is, on the otherhand, suggested to be pure and worthy love. When Rochester loses his sight and his hand, it only deepens Jane's love for him. But what does his loss of sight and limb signify? It could be a religious symbol; the sermon on the mount says that it is better to lose your sight and to cut off your hand than to lust after someone. Perhaps his loss of sight and hand also emasculates Rochester. It takes away his violence and his threat to Jane, making him a more devoted lover.
Tracing the Emotions:
At Gateshead the key emotions are fear, rage, and pride. At Lowood Jane battles more with despair, shame, resignation, and confidence. She is very concerned with Miss Temple's opinion of herself following Brocklehurst's denunciation. At Thornfield Jane is still pretty immature emotionally: she feels pride, infatuation/desire, and jealousy. At Marsh's End Jane really begins to develop her emotions and her character after making the difficult decision to leave Rochester; she feels gratitude, belonging, healthy, spiritual, and uneasy. Finally, when she returns to Fevindean, she feels primarily love and happiness.
Tools in the classroom
- Content Exploration Tasks (Google earth, Grammar girl podcasts on Itunes)
- Production Tasks
- Communication Tasks
- Data Production and Analysis Tasks
- Productivity Tasks
Content Exploration is probably the most familiar type of educational task.
- Reference
- Drill & Practice
- Tutorial
- Games (Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego)
- Simulations
- Open-Ended (geo cache for a field trip, GPS, Google Earth, Google Sketch up)
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Jane Eyre: Background and themes
Background on Charlotte Bronte:
- only lived to age 39
- lived in rural Yorkshire known as the "Moors"
- went to boarding school where two of her sisters died, just like the girls in Lowood
- she and her sisters wrote intensively together; they all worked as governesses and failed
- distanced herself from Jane Eyre by publishing under "Currer Bell"
Religion:
- Helen represents the modern view of religion (one of hope) while Brocklehurst represents the old view of religion (which is about suffering)
- Both Helen and Brocklehurst are very opinionated in their views
- Jane's emotional gospel: justice, speaks out
- Helen's emotional gospel: puts faith in God, subservient
- Rochester's own moral code: existentialism, his own morality
Modern view of feminism: women shouldn't be confined to cooking, sewing, etc. She values mental and emotional action; furthermore, Jane is guided more by empathy than anything else
Overview of a W200 class
NETS-T standards
1. facilitate and inspire student learning and community
2. design and develop digital-age learning experiences and assessments
3. model digital age work and learning
4. promote digital responsibility and citizenship
5. engage in professional growth and leadership
Professional development:
1. Formal includes conferences, classes, and committees
2. Informal includes reading on my own, experimenting with ideas, new ideas from colleagues, wired.com