Books and Daydreams

I have found perhaps the best thing on the internet my friends! It's a modern English to Shakespearean translator!  Use it wisely! Link below, I strongly encourage you to enter song lyrics because they're the most hilarious things to translate! Enjoy. https://lingojam.com/EnglishtoShakespearean

Reading families, the literate lives of urban children by Cathrine Compton-Lilly focuses on reading in intercity or lower SES households. She mainly discusses how parents in lower socio-economic households view and help in their student's reading lives. She also discusses how to help children in intercity schools read better and more independently. She mainly explores this by helping to pair younger students with an older reading buddy or having students who read at a higher level help those who are struggling. I chose this text because I've read articles and papers in the past about how students who come from lower socio-economic households tend to struggle more reading. I was curious to see how I could help similar students in my class as well as learn what their parent's viewpoint on their reading might be. I also thought this book would be a good starting point for looking into this topic. I'll be honest I don't see too much potential in this text specifical...

I thought the integration of knowledge and ideas for ninth to tenth graders was interesting. I think it would be really fun to have an in-depth discussion on why students thought the author might have intended certain meaning from their work. Especially since literature is so subjective, I want to hear how my students felt about the interpretations they were being taught about the text. I also really liked how our students should be able to pull out and identify pieces that were interpreted from other works. the example given was Shakespeare using biblical references in his plays and sonnets. I think this skill will be very useful for our students once they reach college. It’s very likely that they will have to find relevant pieces of information in texts in order to present them in papers or to find other sources to draw from that might be better.   This identification of original source material will be a very useful skill for them in the future. It would also allow us to have ...

1.      How not to write by William Safire focuses on writing grammar by showcasing common mistakes rather than what rules should be followed. This allows the reader to not only quickly identify problems but why they are problems. This book is short which makes it the perfect reference text for this reason. This book does contain 50 chapters, but they are all two pages maximum. This book not only shows the problems but how to fix them in such a short and concise manner.   2.      I chose this text because of how short it was. I liked the idea of having a pocket-sized guide to grammar mistakes. It seemed a great way to quickly identify and understand grammar problems. This would allow me to better help my students fix their, and my mistakes. I liked that I could also find solutions and explanations as to why certain grammar mistakes happen and work. I thought it would be a great reference for me when I edited papers and for my students whe...

I found it interesting that the common core standards start to put a lot of emphasis on college preparedness for writing at the ninth and tenth-grade level. I understand how important it is to try and prepare our students for college and the academic workload that comes with it. Yet, I still feel that perhaps telling parents that their ninth-grader is being prepped for college as soon as they sit down in a classroom to be some unnecessary pressure for those students. Especially since trying to get into college can be stressful enough on its own. I can understand why it’s there and why it’s important, I just worry that overemphasizing how much our high school students are being groomed for college. I think it can cause parents to worry even more if their student starts to struggle with writing.   Writing and proper language use is important however, putting pressure on students to be at college level even before they step on campus seems unwise. Students won’t be able to grow prop...