Fricke's Winter Writing Blag

Dear Dr. Agriss, This quarter was certainly a whirlwind of new and challenging assignments. I particularly found interesting the book talks we held in place as I have often considered exactly how, and what the process for 'pitching' a book I found particularly valuable or engaging to a school board for approval. I now know exactly how to do that, if not the reality of the actual process. I can guarantee I will be doing something very similar to this in the future as my love of literature progresses and I discover new material worth using in the classroom. As an extension of the work done in this class, the unit plan was a beast in of itself. The moment I completed it, I already knew what I could improve. This project I began at the beginning of the quarter spanned 15 different days of instruction and almost as many strategies and activities. I feel more confident in myself as a teacher candidate now that it is all over. If I were to teach the book I wrote my unit plan fo...

Night   is a both a tragic and beautifully terrifying novel. The style of the writing is a bit different than traditional prose due to its "choppy" nature, but I feel this is an excellent choice as it seems to better reflect the thought process and mental processes of a child. The manner in which it is written feels authentic, mostly because it is, but also because it captures in frightful accuracy through powerful imagery the horrors of the Holocaust. I am not sure if I will end up assigning or teaching a unit based off of this book as I almost feel it would be better suited for a class on world history, but I will definitely have it on hand for any student to read should they choose to. Perhaps I could pull pieces from this book to show examples of different styles of narration while also showing important historical information. In my own experience, I was always told to keep making sentences longer and longer and more elaborate. Now, when trying to write creatively or oth...

For this week's blog post I read the article "Critical Literacies and Graphic Novels for English-Language Learners: Teaching Maus". The article discusses how traditional texts are resources with single modalities while graphic novels are multimodal resources that use striking visuals to accompany text that works to promote readers own knowledge resources. This in turn gives them confidence and helps them grow as students and readers. The visual narrative that accompanies the text in graphic novels can provide clues that shed light on the meaning of an unfamiliar word or grammatical structure. Basically, using a graphic text instead of a prose text to access a topic as heavy as the Holocaust would be more beneficial to second language students due to the inherent scaffolding provided with accompanying visuals that are inserted into the text. While the characters in "Maus" are animals, the author does not hold back from the atrocities that the story centers around...

I had always heard the name of Poe floating around as a grew up as a young lover of reading and the dark tones that could be found in suspenseful and thrilling novels. Unfortunately, as I only knew Poe as a poetry writer, I had no interest in reading his works and instead elected for more accessible titles for my age range. It was not until college that I was actually introduced to Poe, and I immediately fell in love with Fall of the House of Usher for all the reasons you can imagine. I can absolutely imagine myself teaching his collections and Philosophy of Composition in my classes; mostly likely held at an 11th or 12th grade level. I don't think I would need an AP course for his novels. The Raven, however, could be introduced at even a sophomore level. If I were conducting a gothic unit, there's no way I would ever be able to complete it without taking a look at at least some of the many quality pieces that Poe has to offer. To pair with my most recent book talk concerning...