Story Telling

As a student in the classroom of English 324, I found it very enjoyable and rewarding to explore being a teacher who explored story telling within a classroom. I appreciated the freedom we had to explore how we would want to communicate the importance of story telling to our students.

As a teacher within this unit, I realized why doing this unit that although I can easily think about why story telling is important and is applicable to every day lives, coming up with lessons that actually allow students to explore that can be difficult. Too often I think we as a society view story telling as something that is strictly playful and fictional. We ignore the fact that all of us are story tellers. In order to really show the true value of story telling, we have to move past fairy tales and fables and explore a little more into how story telling appears in situations applicable to real life. Now, don’t get me wrong, I myself find story telling of every nature to be valuable, but justifying it to meet standards can sometimes be difficult.

As a student participating in other story telling activities delivered by other groups as teachers, I was mostly surprised by how much variety the class as a whole presented. It felt a little strange because I found myself constantly evaluating whether or not their activities were aligned with their lesson and assessment. At times I almost felt like I could predict what the homework would be, knowing what the assignment in class had been. It is difficult to be a student when you have already experienced being the teacher of the same type of lesson.

I mentioned before a few things that I learned about myself along this progress. I would say that as a teacher, I am constantly worrying and rethinking my lessons in order to make them go as smoothly as possible and to assure they are aligned. I think it is also important to note that you should never completely throw out a lesson plan you have thought out ahead of time, however, you must realize it is okay to adapt along the way and most importantly, failure will happen. Failure should be seen as a learning opportunity to figure out what does and does not work. Teachers can then take that knowledge and apply it to making their lessons better. I also learned that coteaching can have its benefits and drawbacks. It is very easy to not let one teacher have a voice, and I think that happened a lot in our group.

As a student, I learned that I have become a more critical one when approached by any type of assignment or activity. I recognize the value in learning from a variety of different teachers with different styles. However, I also realize how I judge the value of lessons based on what I know about alignment, and it’s difficult to not want to just act and give the responses we desire as teachers. I feel like myself as a student is much different than a real high school student. Where I am more willing to respond and participate, a lesson could fail in that regard in a real high school context.

Whether or not story telling is a academically viable unit can be debatable. I feel that how you choose to make it relatable to your students is what is most important. Also, to think about. Also, presenting the idea of story telling and really showing the intellectual tasks it can get students to do such as to describe, explain, evaluate, examine, create, and summarize. It is very easy to forget to that story telling goes beyond fictional fairy tales and that it does get students to practice a variety of skills that can apply to daily life. It is the teacher’s job to ensure that story telling is portrayed and delivered to students in a way that gets them to do something beyond passive listening.

Journaling

In my life, I view almost everything in a way that creates freedom and form. However, what I think would be one thing that gives the most balance between the two would be journaling. When I journal I am still writing, therefore, I do not throw all convention out the window. For the most part my words form sentences, or at least follow an order that creates sentences. However, my thoughts seem unorganized because I freely write rather than try to make one entry have a theme or main topic. The most form that my journaling has would be a basic sentence structure or perhaps when I journal poetry I may create my writing to seem to be in more of a poetic form. But what is so freeing about journaling is that it is simply my own thoughts, however they may enter my head, thrown on a paper without censorship, or worry of judgment. You could also say that my journaling sometimes receives form by my own experiences. By that I mean that the writing comes alive simply because I experience things and write about them. You could say that it is limiting in that way, because it is limited to my own knowledge, experiences, and mind. But I love how much freedom I can have with writing when I do it, though I often do find myself trying to make it "sound good."

Ranking, Liking, and all that Jazz

Our discussion in class on grading opened my eyes to a few things. While reading the article I was interested in the whole idea of "liking" and how that may influence our grading and evaluating as teachers. When I think back to teachers I have had, on more than one occasion I can think of how discouraged I had been by seeing a letter grade on a piece of writing with no real explanation as to how the teacher had reached that judgment. I think more often than not we convince ourselves that we know what an "A" paper is versus a "B" and so on, that we forget that students are the people who really need to know what exactly those letters entail. The evaluation free zones could be helpful in a class I think especially when trying to help students at least grasp some confidence in their own writing. Although I would not say that we need to do away with ranking all together, I think when we do use ranking as teachers, it needs to be with great explanation and justification as well as trying to rank off of a variety of pieces of work rather than each individual assignment.

Assessment

I'd like to take a quick minute and discuss assessment. Honestly I hadn't really though too much about how often students really just want a grade and work for a grade and how often this can take away from their actual learning. I think Peter Elbow makes a lot of good points in his essay about Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking, however I think at times it's a little optimistic. Yes it would be great to say that we could as teachers avoid ranking and do more liking but often other rules and regulations and expectations of our schools and districts would prevent us from always doing so. I would say that within the capabilities within our classrooms it would be great to try to apply Elbow's methods but as he has said, it won't be easy.

Pedagogy

I am going to stray a little bit from discussing alignment because I think that it can be beneficial to discuss each element of the alignment separately also. Recently I've been thinking often about the pedagogy present in my classes. I think it can be interesting to first get into a class and think you know exactly how that professor teaches but then be surprised. For example, it is no secret that your friends may tell you what professors to take and why. Perhaps one never gives tests and only has group work, or maybe you hate group work so you love the professor who lectures and then just gives three tests. I know that for me when I think about what type of pedagogy I enjoy the most in a class I can't really choose one method. I much more prefer classes that give me the opportunity to work in groups, but also at times work on my own critical thinking. Though I do not enjoy as thoroughly the classes that consist mostly of lecture, at times I still feel engaged just listening and comprehending the material as it is taught to me. This probably has greatly to do with the fact that I have never really been able to say which type of learner I am above all other styles. I could say that I'm a visual learner but I know at times I am more auditory also. As teachers I think it's important to realize how much impact our own pedagogy can have on our students interests and engagement. Though it may be difficult to appeal to everyone, we must make effort to grown, learn, and adapt to our students' needs as well as our own.

Values and Alignment

So to be honest before taking this class I really never had thought about the alignment of a lesson or how that may impact my reaction to material in a class. Looking back now, I definitely can see that the alignment definitely was lacking in a few of the classes I enjoyed less than others. I had this one English class last semester where to be honest, I wasn't sure what the goals were other than to expose us to a variety of literature around the world. However, we only really focused on African American literature. This would have been fine if the professors had adjusted the curriculum accordingly. Instead they expected us to be just as knowledgeable about the material we hadn't even touched in class as we were about what we had been talking about the larger part of the semester. When I have classes where the professors are unorganized in their lessons, it really distracts from my learning and my interest in the subject. I just wonder why I should even care if obviously they don't either. This is an important thing I have realized because when I become a teacher consciously I will be trying to make my lessons meaningful and engaging by ensuring that not only do I have good alignment, but that my lessons do hold some value.

The Final Word

I would like to approach this final blog in an effort to discuss the class. I found the novels for the most part to be very interesting and they really helped me understand more about Indian reservations and culture.I really enjoyed that the storie were often told from different perspectives of each character. It made the stories more real for the reader. I also enjoyed how we talked about different aspects of reservation life in class alongside what we saw in the novels. The overall atmosphere of the class was very laid back and inviting which I enjoyed. I have to admit that I really do not like Almanac of the Dead and will probably not finish the novel. There was just too much going on in it that I wasn't quite sure how to comprehend it all. Overall I would have to say that the novel I enjoyed the most was Smoke Dancing because I feel like I learned a lot about oral tradition and reservation life through that book. I would say that having taken this class I feel a little more aware about the judgements and stereotypes that we place on the Indian people and how wrong they can be. I also feel more passionate about exploring my own native blood.