Learning Letter

Work I’ve Completed in the Course

            During the ENGL 493: Teaching Literature to Adolescents course, I developed a three-week unit plan on the Holocaust.  This assignment was fantastic!  I most liked that this assignment had real value, not a waste of time and energy.  Writing 15 edTPA lesson plans was challenging, but it was the best practice for preparing to teach in a classroom.  They say that hindsight is 20/20.  If I had to do my unit again, I would have attempted to write a handful of lesson plans during the first weeks of the quarter.  Writing them early would have helped me twofold: It would have allowed me to get accustomed to writing them, and I would have gotten them done!  However, as it turned out, I didn’t quite have enough information early in the quarter to write the lesson plans.  I was still figuring it all out.

            I also created my very first blog.  Technology is not second nature to me, so I’m quite proud of myself for figuring it out.  Yaay me!  On my blog, I submitted 15 posts about the readings.  I applaud the idea of using a blog rather than Canvas.  At first, I didn’t realize the significance of using the blog, but now I do.  My access to Canvas will terminate soon, but the blog will live on as long as the website and the Internet do.  I liked the idea of student blogs so much that I decided to incorporate the idea into my Holocaust unit.  It’s an excellent method for turning in work with no papers to track.

I completed two Book Talks.  The first was on Cleo: The Cat who Mended a Family (2009) by Helen Brown in which the author tries to cope with grief after losing her young son.  I chose this book for two reasons: I like reading books about animals, and grief touches everyone, eventually.  Many people need to be guided through the ordeal of grief.  The Cleo book might help them.  My second Book Talk was Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1933) that detailed what life was like for her husband as a boy in rural New York State during the 1860s.  I chose this book also for two reasons: It was about a male main character which I thought would better appeal to male readers of all ages.  Also, reading this book as a 10-year-old was the first time in which I realized that reading could make pictures in my head.  I so enjoyed the Book Talks—doing mine and watching my classmates’ presentations—and plan to incorporate the idea into my future teaching.

Theories and Concepts

            Of the theories, concepts, authors, and ideas we studied, I was most drawn to the work of Tovani and Gallagher.  I was introduced to Gallagher’s writing in ENGL 408: The Composition Process last year with Dr. Beth Torgerson.  His writing style and the way I imagine how he teaches in his own classroom spoke to me.  Gallagher’s (2006) book Readicide didn’t disappoint.  I most appreciated his observation that many teachers insist on filling curriculum with excessive “inane, mind-numbing practices” that turn off students to reading.  It’s so interesting that reading—the very thing that English teachers are trying to promote—is actually the thing that is dying because of these excessive activities (p. 2). 

            I also appreciated Tovani’s (2000) book.  I am a strong reader.  I can understand the benefit to reading well, so I tend to keep at it until I master the text.  The text mentions that good readers “monitor their comprehension” and “ask questions about the text before, during, and after reading” (p. 17).  Poor readers simply give up.  Only with difficult texts must I analyze my ability to read and comprehend my reading.  Through Tovani’s writing, I was able to see that every text is a difficult text for poor readers and that they must diligently practice to improve. 

Participation Influenced my Thinking

            I loved melding what we were reading and discussing with tidbits from my teaching experience.  For example, during the discussion about Brookfield’s Discussion as a Way of Teaching, one classmate said she was afraid that students might say “What a bitch!” about her.  I told the classmate that teaching taught me that you can’t prepare for every situation in the classroom.  Sure, it’s good to have an idea of what to do or say before something happens, but planning out every detail is impossible.  And you’ll drive yourself mad if you try.  I told my classmate that I had been called a bitch by students.  I accepted the slam and countered with “I might be a bitch, but I’m the one who knows grammar, and I’m in charge of teaching it to you.”  Yes, it’s true that teaching in an adult learning center is different than teaching children in a public school.  However, children can easily throw swear words at the teacher.  It’s the teachers job to try to stay on the path of learning, however than has to happen.  My classmate thanked me for telling her how I handled the situation.  My participation in class influenced—and will continue to influence—how I teach and interact with my students—as someone who’s in charge of teaching them.

Chocolate-Mint Mock Toffee

1c butter, melted

1/2c sugar

1/2c brown sugar

2 to 2 1/2 stack packs graham crackers (or saltines)

30-35 (1 1/2-inch) York (or generic) chocolate-covered peppermints, unwrapped

1c chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350°.  Remove wrappers from mints.  Set aside.

IMPORTANT: Line 18x12x1 jelly roll pan with foil.  IMPORTANT: Butter the foil.  Line the foiled pan with graham crackers, breaking them to fit (no need for perfection). 

Melt butter in saucepan on medium-low heat.  Stir in sugars.  Cook and stir constantly for 5 minutes to avoid burning.  Pour butter-sugar mixture over crackers in pan, and spread to the corners. 

Bake 350° for 6-8 minutes until bubbly.  Remove pan from oven.  Immediately, distribute mints and sprinkle chocolate chips over butter-sugar mixture.  Return pan to oven 2-3 minutes to melt chocolate.  Remove from oven.  With a spatula or spoon, spread melted mints and chips to edges. 

Cool until chocolate is cold and hardened.  When chocolate is set, peel off foil and break or cut into pieces.

Variations: Peanut butter, marshmallows, butterscotch/chocolate/white chocolate/peanut butter chips.

Blog Post 15 – Wiesel’s Night

[B]ooks, just like people, have a destiny.

Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.

—Elie Wiesel, Preface of Night, p. xiv

            For me, Night invited some joy but mostly sorrow.  Using the words horrific, atrocious, and heinous to describe what Wiesel and others endured during the Holocaust seem terribly insufficient.  Perhaps if I were a book author like Wiesel, I might be better able to express my horror.  I imagine that Wiesel—and other Holocaust writers—wrote their stories to help them cope with the atrocities.  But why must we read these stories?  The only reason I think is valid is that knowing that these events occurred will help ensure that they do not happen again.  With knowledge, we become smarter and more sensitive and empathetic to other’s problems, especially those brought on by those in power.

            An acquaintance of Wiesel’s, Moishe the Beadle, was taken away to Poland, shot, and left for dead.  After his ordeal, he was “not the same. The joy in his eyes was gone.  He no longer sang.  He no longer mentioned either God or Kabbalah.  He spoke only of what he had seen” (p. 7). 

I too have witnessed violence.  Of course, not on the scale as any Holocaust victims.  My husband committed suicide—shooting himself in the chest with a .357—in front of me and my eight-year-old son.  This event happened 24 years ago, but writing about it still brings tears to my eyes.  My son is now 32 and still suffers from watching that violence. 

Healing is vital to the human condition.  I think that writing can help heal wounds.  If my future students are at all like my former students, they too will have suffered, enduring time in jail/prison, unemployment, times of famine, and acts of violence—both self-induced and as victims.  I learned long ago that writing about terrible events dull the edges of adverse experiences.  Writing the 63 words in the previous paragraph took much effort.  But I tried to focus on the fact that my telling my reader about how suicide touched my life makes it not hurt as much.  I will therefore encourage my students to write—if they are able—about their troubles, thoughts, and feelings.

Blog Post 14 – Jacobson and Colón’s Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House authorized graphic biography

            I read Archie comic books when I was a kid.  I enjoyed them, but that was fiction.  And they were about silly topics.  Jacobson and Colón’s graphic novel, however, brought Anne Frank’s non-fiction life alive for me. 

This graphic novel offered a pleasant blending of historical data with possible sidenotes about Anne Frank and her friends and family.  For example, on the morning of May 10, 1940, Anne is depicted to be awakened by noises outside their apartment in Amsterdam.  This event occurred when Anne was nearly 11 years old, therefore, more than two years before she began keeping her diary.  Her parents stand at the window, and her father told her the noise was from attacking German planes.  The caption for the next frame stated that on that day, the “German forces invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg” (p. 49).  Even though Anne did not write in her diary during this time, it is completely plausible that a child would wander out of bed, asking parents about noises.  This scene helped me remember that non-fiction events happened to real people.

I think reading graphic novels is similar to listening to audible books.  There was a time that I didn’t consider listening to audible books as “real” reading.  I probably felt the same way about graphic novels—if I’d encountered any.  I have, however, changed my tune.  I now think that audible books promote a different set of skills that reading words with one’s own eyes cannot.  Being able to listen well and to attend to the speaker are tremendously valuable skills which are used by all hearing-able people.  Graphic novels also teach additional skills, more than simply reading words on the page.  They also promote “visual literacy,” a necessary skill in today’s world of traversing websites, working with collaborative media, and playing video games (Scholastic, 2018, para. 15).

According to Jacobson and Colón, after publishing Anne’s diary, Otto Frank received many letters from young fans.  He replied back to them, often closing with “I hope Anne’s book will have an effect on the rest of your life . . . . [and] you will work for unity and peace” (p. 139).  Both Anne’s diary and this graphic novel have for me.

References

Jacobson, S., & Colón, E. (2010). Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House authorized graphic biography. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.

Scholastic. (2018). A guide to using graphic novels with children and teens. Retrieved from https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/lesson-plans/teaching-content/guide-using-graphic-novels-children-and-teens/

Book Talk on Farmer Boy (1933) by Laura Ingalls Wilder

ENGL 493: Teaching Literature to Adolescents

Laura Pallaske

March 5, 2018

Outline

            The Farmer Boy book is the second in the Little House book series.  The story is about author’s husband Almanzo during his 10th and 11th years in the late-1860s.  He grew up on a large, prosperous farm near Malone, New York, learning responsibility by doing.  In the book, Almanzo had an older brother Royal and older sisters Eliza Jane and Alice.  His oldest sister Laura—who does not appear in the book—was in her twenties and out of the house by then.  Also, a younger brother Perley Day had not yet been born.

            The book detailed the farm’s never-ending daily chores, including milking cows, feeding all the animals—horses, cows, sheep, chickens, and pigs—and mucking stalls. Other chores were seasonal, such as shearing the sheep, filling the icehouse, hauling wood, and making hay.

            The chapter, “Keeping house,” is about when the Wilder children were left alone to tend the farm for a week while their parents visited a relative 10 miles away.  Their mother’s parting words—“And don’t eat all the sugar!”—didn’t deter them from making ice cream, cakes, and molasses taffy (p. 204).  The last day before their parents were due back, they hurriedly scrubbed the house, weeded the garden, cleaned the barns, and painted the henhouse.  They fretted about their eating almost all the sugar.  Tempers flared, resulting in a shoeblack splotch on the parlor’s shiny wallpaper.  The children knew a terrible punishment was inevitable.

Biography

            Laura Ingalls Wilder was best known for writing the Little House children’s books.  She was born on February 7, 1867, in a log cabin near Pepin, Wisconsin.  She joined her parents and sister Mary.  Two other sisters and a brother later followed.  Her brother died at age nine months.  The family moved often during her childhood.  In addition to Wisconsin, they lived in Missouri, Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota.  

At age 15, Laura passed the test for her teaching certificate.  She began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse 12 miles from home.  A family friend, Almanzo Wilder, fetched her for weekend visits at home.  During these trips, they began courting.

            Laura and Almanzo married in 1885.  They had two children.  Their first years of married life were fraught with disaster, including ruined crops, crushing debt, their home burning to the ground, and the death of their newborn son.  In 1894, they trekked from De Smet, South Dakota, to Mansfield, Missouri, to start anew.  There they built Rocky Ridge Farm where they lived until their deaths, Almanzo in 1949 at age 92 and Laura in 1957 at age 90. 

            In the 1920s, the Wilders’ daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, convinced Laura to write about her life.  After some fits and starts, Laura produced the book Little House in the Big Woods (1932), telling when she is five years old.  She described events like the sugaring off when they harvested maple tree sap and the time that her mother slapped a bear, thinking it was Sukey, the family cow.

Laura’s book series made it to popular culture.  The books were loosely followed to create the television series, Little House on the Prairie (1974), starring Melissa Gilbert as Laura and Michael Landon as her father.

Rationale

In my experience with teaching GED courses, few adult students read, but I found that male students read much—much!—less than female students.  I think the stories in Farmer Boy might speak to male students.  I discovered Farmer Boy as a 10-year-old, but I have three brothers, so I’ve always felt I could relate well to a boy’s point-of-view.  This book remains one of my treasured reads.

According to Virginia Kirkus—book editor when Farmer Boy was published—the book is the “story of a vanishing phase of American life” (Wikipedia, 2017, para. 4).  Pivotal texts—like Farmer Boy—are important because they tell of days gone by.  Alt text: LIW’s Little House in the Big Woods.

Teaching Ideas

1.      Discussion: Students discuss descriptions in Farmer Boy of the farm where Almanzo Wilder grew up and how the actual farm is shown on YouTube documentaries. 

2.      Research project/essay: Students research life in the 1860s.  Sample topics include the lack of electricity, transportation, maintaining hygiene, medical care, or the hard work necessary to make a daily living.  Students write a compare/contrast essay about their findings.

3.      Ice cream activity: The class makes homemade ice cream like Almanzo and his brother and sisters made while their parents were away (Old-fashioned, 2017).  During a discussion, students compare/contrast their experiences with that of the Wilder children from the book.

Obstacles

Whether administrators, parents/guardians, or the students themselves would challenge my reasoning for teaching Farmer Boy, I would offer the following rationale: 

The book is written at a fourth- to sixth-grade level, according to several readability formulas.  There is a chapter about what a teacher does to students who bully him.  Overall, the subject matter is very wholesome with no death, sex, or foul language.  Therefore, some adult students might think this book or its subject matter is below them.  They might question how a book written 85 years ago about events from 150 years ago could be relevant for them today. 

I will tell anyone who asks that the events described in this book are about keeping the family unit together during a time when daily living was difficult.  Keeping family intact is a common theme in many contemporary texts. 

References

Book snob for discerning readers. (2011, February 20). Farmer boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Retrieved from https://bookssnob.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/farmer-boy-by-laura-ingalls-wilder/

[BradRoss63]. (2016, September 2016). Almanzo Wilder farm. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWsDWUcWcY4

[Dean Butler]. (2015, January 16). Almanzo Wilder: Life before Laura comes to Amazon and iTunes. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKOyCV 9PvDw

[Home Town Cable Network]. (2016, May 9). OLC – Almanzo Wilder farm 5-27-08. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZJl87u7UxQ

Old-fashioned Farmer Boy ice cream recipe. (2017). Little house on the prairie. Retrieved from http://littlehouseontheprairie.com/old-fashioned-ice-cream-recipe/

Welcome to the Wilder homestead. (2017). Almanzo Wilder farm. Retrieved from https://almanzowilderfarm.com/

Wikipedia. (2017, October 17). Farmer boy. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer_Boy 

Wilder, L. I.  (1933). Farmer boy. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Zochert, D. (1976). Laura: The life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. New York, NY: Avon Books.