Skip to main content

Genre Exploration (Again)

I have a better idea! Since most people are doing short stories for their UGP, I thought I should be a bit more original. So I went to a place of inspiration...Facebook. I follow a page on Facebook called "Humans of New York" where these random stories are collected of people from New York. (Right now they are traveling in Asia.) And I thought I could do something like that!

My idea is that I will talk to at least 25 people over the week, and ask them to share a bit of their story with me. (This will take about 5 minutes of their time.) I will write down their story, and put them in my "classroom". Then, I will write a proposal or essay on how I would teach these people if they were in my English, Literature class. I want to come up with a specific example of what I would teach them, but I'm still working on that. Mostly I'm just making up the rules as I go along. I want to get a diverse crowd so I can get an idea of what it would be like to be in a typical high school classroom. I have already interviewed 5 people so far, two of them are in our class! I think this project will be fun. I'm gonna make some new friends, AND learn! Woot!

Comments

  1. Mudita, I'm REALLY excited about this project. A couple of things to keep in mind:

    1. Allow yourself to interview fewer people if you need to. Having conducted interviews as part of my own research, I know that this number is A LOT, especially when you consider finding the person, setting up the interview, etc. I'd rather that you have longer interviews with fewer people, especially if you're emulating the "Humans of New York" model. You also need to allow yourself to draw on the interviews to complete your UGP. Be kind to yourself!

    2. Make sure that you're integrating your own core beliefs about education as you construct the project. Ask me about this if it becomes a challenge.

    Good luck with the project! I'm eager to see how it unfolds.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sourdough Bread Journey

 I've always been interested in baking bread and I recently took on the endeavour of baking sourdough. Immediately, I started to hear how difficult sourdough bread is to bake due to the the time consuming aspect of baking the bread properly. Even before this journey, I knew that bread-bakers always attributed sourdough to a very difficult bread. So, I started this journey with my guard up, expecting to make many mistakes that would result in uneatable bread.  Guess what. They lied.  I'm not saying it was incredibly easy, there are plenty of lessons I've learned through my mistakes. But those mistakes do not mark a difficulty for me, they mark my accomplishments. I've made mistakes I never thought I could make through my journey of baking sourdough, but they taught me valuable lessons and I don't regret a single mistake I made.  I decided to dust off my blog after taking to a friend about sourdough, and all she had heard about it was that it was the most difficult th...

Students telling their stories

I think the greatest way teachers can help students is by letting them tell their story and paying attention to it. This can be by a short story assignment or just encouraging kids to write. Especially for kids who are bullied--we have a lot on our minds that often goes unsaid because we felt like no one would care. It's important to encourage students to write about their experiences so that they could try to learn from them. A great resource I found, though it seems a little rushed, is National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. This website encourages people, student or not, to write a "novel" in the month of November and submit it at the end of the month. What you do is you make a profile so that you can start your novel on November 1st. And every time you write, you copy and paste your progress into their website so they can keep track of your progress. You earn badges along the way and even get some feedback from other users. This is a great way to encourage kid...

The Joy of Baking

Having baking as a hobby was always a challenge for me, especially because I have a habit of getting angry and blaming the recipe rather than myself. It seems obvious now, of course, that I was to blame for all the burned food I prepared. But now that I am trying to be patient with myself and not rush the process, I am seeing better results. I finally understand how baking or cooking can be fun!  I used to be jealous of people who would eat good food at restaurants and be able to recreate the dish at home. My goal is to become one of those people. Because let's face it, we can't always go to a restaurant to eat good food. Plus, something about the sense of accomplishment makes the food taste better. There's something relaxing about taking your time and cooking something you love. Eventually, you start to think of ways you can improve the recipe and add your touch to it. Like, yeah cookies are cookies but mine have coconut flakes. Which makes them better.  The euphoric momen...