Radiohead - Exit Music (For a Film)

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Blog in the Classroom

I would probably use blogging in the same manner that has been used in my English 495ESM class. This way, I could use it as a modern day journal entry that the students would write before coming to class so that they would have something to talk about before we began. This way, I am not using up class time to have the students write in journals, and I would be able to view the blogs anywhere as long as I had internet connection. It would also save on ink and paper.

I could also use a blog as a way for me to get into contact with my students. I could write down homework assignments, as well as websites that would go along with what I am teaching in the classroom. This way, the students would not have an excuse for not turning in homework because it would be available to them all the time, provided they have internet access.

Either way, I’m pretty sure I will be using a blog in my classroom. This will give the students access to media literacy when they write blogs about what we are learning in class.

Fiction Writing and Writing Fiction

I believe that writing about fiction and writing fiction each requires a knowledge of the other. In order to write about literature, one must know the jargon that goes with academic analysis, for example historical context, as well as the jargon that is associated with fiction, for example genre, plot, and characters. In order to write fiction, one must have the same writing terminology, like characters and plot, in the back of ones’ mind as he or she begins to journey through the imagination, letting it take hold of the writer in order to create in the written world.

Writing fiction has helped me to write better about fiction. I know that from the standpoint of a writer, one of the most common things a writer can do is write about what they know. In this way, I know to look at the historical, cultural, and economic significance of time, place, and history of the writer. With this, I can get a better grasp for the reasons why the writer had his characters behave a certain way, or why the time and place in the story was so important.

For my future career in teaching, I learned that history of not only the writer, but the history of the country as well, is important in understanding why a particular writer wrote what he or she did. When I begin the increasingly growing charge of teaching a class, I will take this knowledge that history plays an important part in reading and comprehending literature.

Myth Making and Myth Reading

Learning about myths helps in the creation of myths. When I began to sit down and write my myth, I found that I was using some of the details and examples from researching sacred places and I was able to incorporate these into my myth. I think that learning about any topic before you take the plunge into creating your own work is a good idea.

One of the main differences between creation and study of myths is the use of imagination. Everything is laid out in front of you when you read a myth, whether it be about the male or female divine, or a creation myth. When you create your own myth, though, the possibilities are limitless. The thing I like most about myth making is the level of creativity that you have. You can write about the creation of a pen from the ink of an octopus, or how the moon came to be because a lonely woman wanted to see her great-grand children. The possibilities are limitless.

Learning about myths, as well as writing my own, has helped me to start to think about the ways in which I will be teaching, not only myth, but English in general. For example, I found that contemporary examples of ‘sacred places’, my myth topic, helped both me and my targeted audience in understanding the different types of sacred places that exist. Also, getting your students interested and invested in the subject through planned group work, and getting up to act out a scene can really help instill the important characteristics of what you want your students to learn.

Poetry

Writing poetry requires a knack for looking at the world in unusual ways, for example, creating new and innovative ways to say the same thing. It requires a lot of the time and thought in order to create fresh expressions that will make a poem more aesthetically pleasing. In writing poetry, I’ve also found that contemporary poetry writes about an individual theme using a universal subject as the backdrop. If it sounds complicated, it is. With writing poetry, I don’t think it’s supposed to be easy. I think the writer is suppose to lose something when writing a poem, and this loss from the poet will be highlighted and will make the poem all the more rich for the audience to read.

In writing about poetry, the analyst has to be ready to go into a vague, richly detailed poem in order to show others what you got out of it. Writing about poetry can be just as difficult as writing poetry. For instance, when I was reading “Mont Blanc” by Percy Shelly, I couldn’t understand the poem for the life of me. It took my professor to almost shove my face in the poem and point to me what the poet was trying to get at. I think the perfect person to write about poetry is a poet, because a poet will have, at the very least, the basic tools and vocabulary to amply analyze a poem.

I guess what I’m saying is that those who want to write about poetry should write poetry themselves. This way, they will have that much more of an understanding of how to write about poetry.

Introductions

Hey Party People! For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Joshua Chisholm. I used to have something like this on another website where I would rant about significant goings-on in my life, as well as posting some of my rough draft stories. This is my last semester at California State University Northridge (CSUN), and am incredibly thrilled about this prospect. The only down-side is that I’ve decided to get my Masters in Teaching and Credentials at the same time. So basically I’m coming right out of one learning environment and into another.

There isn’t a lot to say about me as a person. I spend a lot of time reading, playing video games, and sleeping. Life, for as long as I can remember it, has revolved around school. And in all of that time I can count, on one hand, the amount of teachers that have inspired learning within me. It is a sad state of affairs when I find myself wanting to be a teacher, not in emulation, but in response to a vapid community of educators.

I hope that I will break this dreary mold and bring energy and life back into a classroom. I know that it will be tedious at points, tiresome at others, but in the end, when that one student comes up to me after the school year to tell me that they have enjoyed having me as a teacher, I know it will all be worth it. On the other side of the coin from hope is my fear that I will be just as awful as some of the teachers who “taught” me. Maybe I won’t be the kind of person who can deal with a classroom environment, and will end up hindering, more than helping, this situation. And if this is the case, I hope I will realize my mistake in this career choice and move onto something else.

This English 495ESM class is helping me to notice technology for teaching purposes. Email and instant messaging come to mind with students who are having problems with material. Also, school projects and assignments can be posted online for the convenience of the students. The only problem with technology is that not all students are savvy with it. Some do not own computers, and others use it chiefly for watching TV shows, youtube videos, or other worthless gestures, that a main point of the web, to learn, is put at the wayside.

Till next time,

~Later Days