Sam's Whirlwind of Thoughts

Now that I am at the end of this course, there are a lot of things to reflect on. One main thing is what I've completed in this course and how it will help me as a future educator. The text presentations were super beneficial to me. It forced me to do research on different books that would help teach in a secondary ed classroom. It also helped me present in front of my peers, which obviously I'm going to have to do in front of many students once I start teaching. It helped me get more comfortable in front of people looking at me as I present information that is important to me and for all of us. As far as the content portfolio goes, I struggled with it a lot, but I am glad that it was assigned. I got to look back and see what is going to be important to me as a teacher and how and what I plan to teach. For example, I personally want to make sure my secondary students know about figurative language. I was never really taught this, so I want to make sure I teach my students so th...

Samantha Asmussen Literature/Reading Text Presentations SUMMARY Reading and Writing about Literature by Janet E. Gardner explains how to read and write about literature, hence the title. It “includes more help with close reading, more samples of student writing, new annotated literature, and overall more help with understanding the literary elements and the writing process.” I took that quote from the back of the book. Basically, step by step its about: An introduction to reading and writing about literature The role of good reading The writing process Common writing assignments Writing about stories, poems, plays, and research papers Literary criticism and literary theory  A list of literary terms  WHY I CHOSE THIS TEXT When I was looking online for certain texts, I came across this one on amazon and it had the “look inside” section, so I did just that. I looked at the ‘Contents’ and and found so many helpful subjects, so I decided that mayb...

With regards to the NES text pages 1 to 87, it seemed like there were just a lot of terms that I should have known. The scary thing about it is that I wasn't sure about a lot of these terms. I took notes on the terms that I wasn't sure about and it ended up being about a page of just definitions. I went into depth into these pages because I wanted to make sure that when I took the NES (which I took yesterday) I actually knew what the heck the questions were asking. When I saw the words come up, I knew that I had seen them before, but not for a really long time. For example, I remember learning about what hyperbole, euphemism, allusion, synecdoche, paradox, etc., were in middle school but I haven't really heard anything about them since then except the occasional word being used by a professor and I'm always super confused by it.  With the CCSS Reading Literature Standards, I wanted to specifically talk about standard  CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.10 . " By the end o...

SUMMARY Eats, Shoots, & Leaves by Lynne Truss is about different types of punctuation and how to use them correctly. Let's take it chapter by chapter to explain what it is really about. Chapter One titled “Introduction- The Seventh Sense” is about how amazing punctuation really is. It is tiny and adaptable system of marks that allow us to notate verbal expressions. It also jokes on the seventh sense of  “dead punctuation”. Chapter two titled “The Tractable Apostrophe” talks about apostrophes and how they are correctly used. Chapter three “That’ll Do, Comma” discusses commas and how to (and not to) use them. Chapter five’s “Airs and Graces” is about the not either well known, used, or used correctly colon and semicolon. Moving on to chapter six “Cutting a Dash” is about exclamation marks, which is definitely one of my favorite punctuation marks. Next onto chapter seven, “A Little Used Punctuation Mark” about hyphens. I for one know that I am super guilty of just not using hyp...

When looking at the CCSS for writing, I was not surprised as to what I found. The standards listed seem to just be what I learned in more intense terms. When it comes to the CCSS for language, I found that I didn't understand what it was getting at. I believe the main point that I got from this section though was from 11-12.6. It said, "Acquire and use accurately general academic and domain-specific words and phrases, sufficient for reading, writing, speaking, and listening at the college and career readiness level; demonstrate independence in gathering vocabulary knowledge when considering a word or phrase important to comprehension or expression." That pretty much sums up what language is and how to teach it in a classroom in my opinion. From the NES pages, it was also just basically review. It talked a lot about the basics of writing and the language of these. I did enjoy the examples that these pages used however. Things such as how to write a paper and the correct pu...

Samantha Asmussen SUMMARY This text is about ways in which visual literacy and graphic novels are used to help students and teachers learn better in the classroom. It also is looking to further grow the popularity of graphic novels by presenting suggestions of graphic novels with more traditional texts to analyze the connections. A few of these connections between graphic and traditional texts include:  The chapter titled “Showing and Telling History through Family Stories in Persepolis and Young Adult Novels” talks about real life examples of family and life issues that people go through. There is bullying both to individuals and a group of individuals (bullying from the government). Not only do the young adult novels we read in class teach us something, but books like Persepolis teach us “families in these novels chose not to surrender their sense of identity or integrity… remind us all how fragile the freedoms are that we so easily take for granted.” (46)  There ar...