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Don't Forget to Write

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I chose this book because after a couple of quarters ago when I had to create a two-week-long curriculum with lesson plans for each day I realized that creating engaging lesson plans to help these kids pursue their writing skills was extremely difficult. I was constantly questioning if what I was teaching them was even going to help them in their future classes. This book really gave me fantastic writing lesson ideas, and they were very easy to modify into my own curriculum.  I also chose this book because I really think if I hold onto it I can modify these lessons throughout my years of teaching in order to engage different classes on different subjects. This book even included rubrics which I think is fantastic because creating your own rubric can be very hard due to the fact you’re not really sure at first how to grade your students. College Application Essay Boot Camp. This writing prompt required students to research three completely different college application...
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Learning Letter

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I  really enjoyed the book talk aspect of this course. It was really nice seeing everyone’s various book interests along with the issues they plan on taking down. The issues in book talks ranged from mental health to fantasy problems. I also enjoyed learning about these various books. I never thought I would be interested in a sci-fi books but it made me interested learning about them.  The unit plan made me feel more prepared as a future educator. I really enjoyed building s unit plan that I know I created and that would benefit my students. I would like to pick a novel like a book talk book and start making lesson plans for various books to get ideas on how to build lesson plans on different book types and to also build my lesson plan skills. Book talks encouraged me to choose novels out of my comfort zone; just because I enjoy a novel doesn’t mean my students will as well, I need to remember that.  Learning about discussion based learning changed my views on u...
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Edgar Allen Poe

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I decided to choose " The Black Cat ". A short summary of this short story is a  narrator was once a good person and an animal lover, and he married a wife of a similar disposition, but he has turned to drink and begun to abuse his wife, his pets, and particularly his cat named Pluto. He finally hangs the cat, which coincides with the burning down of his house and the resulting loss of his property, but after some months he adopts a similar cat, which differs from Pluto only in the patch of fur on its chest. He comes to hate the cat, and when he finally attacks it, his wife gets in the way, and he kills her instead, hiding the body behind a wall. However, he accidentally walls up to the cat as well, when the police come to investigate, the cat cries out and reveals the corpse's hiding place.  One thing I notice with a lot of Poe's short stories is the fact we never really have a clear view of who the narrator is. In many of his short stories, the narrator is unnamed. ...
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Night by Elie Wiesel

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I am going to start off by saying this novel was horrifying and real. As I stated in my Round House blog post, trauma deserves to feel real in a novel. Growing up, the main holocaust novel everyone had read or heard about was "The Diary of Anne Frank". That was the main novel taught along with the Holocaust lessons in high school history classes. The holocaust wasn't taught with as much depth as it deserves, in my opinion. I was taught with slideshows and pictures pulled from Google, I did not fully comprehend what people ACTUALLY went through until I read Anne Frank's story. Hearing the story from a first person's experience made this traumatic event hit me differently than it did by listening to a lecture. This novel hit me even differently than Anne Frank's story and I loved every emotional moment of it. These days, many students aren't;t even learning about the Holocaust, we must rely on people's stories to keep this alive. I found a quote when I ...
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Autobiography Of A Face by Lucy Grealy

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Summary: It describes her childhood struggles with jaw cancer and the resulting disfigurement that she considers the true tragedy of her life. With the exception of the prologue, the memoir employs a linear narrative, detailing Grealy’s life from early childhood into adulthood. The prologue begins several years after Grealy’s cancer treatment, with an account of an adolescent Grealy helping a local stable with a ‘pony party’ in a nearby suburb. As she works the party, we see how acutely aware Grealy is of the partygoers curious and disturbed gazes at her disfigured jaw, which she attempts to hide behind her long hair. Even from the brief anecdote, we can see clearly how ashamed Grealy is at her own disfigurement. The memoir then moves back in time to Grealy’s early childhood and the accident that led to the discovery of her cancer. Fourth-grade Lucy sustains a minor injury while playing dodgeball in school. This injury leads her to the  dentist who is the first to realize ...
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Into The Wild

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Into The Wild is a novel I read in high school, and it is a novel that is stuck with me ever since I first picked it up. The thought of leaving everything behind just to experience a mindless adventure is so exhilarating in my mind. We spent so much of our lives worried about work, grades, relationships, etc. It was such a breath of fresh air reading a story that doesn’t have to worry about any of these things. I am a firm believer in adventure and travel, everyone needs to experience a different part of the world or even their state and just live without their “normal” worries for a bit. This novel is brilliant, and I believe that kids would take a lot out of it, however, I don’t believe parents would feel the same way as me . I can see parents saying it will pursue their children to run away or give up on their responsibilities. I can also see them arguing that their children might want to do that in their future.  My high school teacher taught us this novel in a very amazi...
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The Round House

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     Reading  The Round House , written by Louis Erdrich brought me to a very weird place in my mind, to say the least. It was remarkable to me that an author can produce a novel that is humorous and disturbing at the same time. Reading this novel through the eyes of a young boy really changes the perspective in your reading as well.      One thing that stood out to me was the foreshadowing that happens to connect the middle of the novel to the beginning. The initial scene of the book gives the reader some figurative implication, as Joe evacuates trees that have begun to grow into the groundwork of his home. As the plot of the novel starts to unfold, it starts to become clear to the reader that this scene foreshadows Joe’s murder of Linden Lark to revenge his mother’s rape. Like the murder, evacuating the trees shields Joe’s childhood home, but both also make Joe act in a violent behavior that hurts him and reduce...
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