Rethinking my Classroom Library

9. I have a classroom library. It consists of a bookshelf full of young adult novels that I've read. And it is packed. My students are usually impressed at the beginning of the school year when I show them the library and tell them that I can recommend any of my books to them based on their interests because I've read them all. I hope that this shows them that I really do love reading. Every year, I lend out my books, I get most of them back. I do have a check-out system, but I'm not good at enforcing it. I have also gotten suggestions from my students, read the books and added them to the library. Typically students who are already avid readers are most interested in my library, but every once in a while I'm able to get a reluctant reader to read a book or two. And I hope the books I keep in my classroom encourage all of my students to develop (or begin) a love (ok a like?) of reading. One problem that I've recently encountered is that I've switched to a Kindle. Now I can't add to my library because I don't own physical copies of them. But I can continue to buy hard copies of the ones I really like (or think students should read.) This class made me realize that while I do have diversity in my classroom library: multiple races, sexual orientations, different genres (fiction, fantasy, science fiction) I need to work on diversity because I don't have an adequate representation of multi-cultural books, I have no graphic novels, and I have no books on poetry. So, as I work to build my library, I will try to incorporate more diverse books (genre, format, and content) so that my library will interest more students.

Gender Stereotypes in children's literature

After reading many different children's books and doing a project, I have realized just how many gender stereotypes there are in them. These fairy tales tell little girls that beauty is valued other all charactereistics in our society. They tell young boys that they must be brave, handsome, courageous, never afraid, and always strong. These are unrealistic ideas and these stories put tremendous pressure on children to meet these expectations. However, these books and stories are continuously published, bought, and passed on from generation to generation. This tells a lot about our society. Often times people judge by what they see and do not bother to look much further than that. This could come from the ideas which we were all exposed to as children early on in life. Are we born looking at the world this way, or do these stories and the media really have that much of an impact on our lives?

I think it is important as parents and teachers to have discussions with young children when they watch or read these stories to help them understand that these stereotypes and traits are not what they should hold most important in their lives.

Blogging

Before this class, I had no prior experiences with blogging. Although I am not a big fan of it, I do believe that it is useful. Blogging is a good way for students, teachers, and really anyone to voice their opinions where they might not otherwise have felt comfortable to do in a pulic setting. For me, I was always quiet in the classroom growing up. Looking back at it now I think blogging could have been useful for me. Teachers could learn a lot by reading their students' posts and comments.

I may consider using a blogging site when I become a teacher for some of these reasons. My only concern would be that there is not really a way to control what students post on the internet.

I was wondering how others felt about blogging as well. Did you enjoy it or find it useful? Would you consider using it in the future?

children's audio books?

I’m curious how future teachers might feel about audio books for children’s literature.  I understand that audio books are super convenient for the teacher to listen to them when discovering new books for the classroom. However, I feel like for children they are an easy way out.

I remember when I was in 3^rd or 4^th grade we were assigned to read phantom tollbooth, which was the longest book I’d ever even considered reading.  I was a wild child who did do much reading, and pretty much would have rather done anything besides read that particular book.  The good news for me was that my mother was a teacher, so she happened to have phantom tollbooth on a homemade audio tape.  I sneakily took the tape and listened to my mom read me the story of phantom tollbooth.  My teacher was very impressed with how quickly I had finished it and no one ever found out.

To this day I’ve never read it, and I don’t definitely don’t remember the plot.  It might be irrelevant with book summaries and reviews all over the internet, but at least students have to read in order to get the abridged version of the book.  Especially books assigned in schools, any book can be purchased or rented as an audio book.  This means that potentially children would never actually have to read anything.  Not even to mention Youtube readings and movies that convince children they know the book.  I’m curious how difficult it actually is, or if there is just a few kids like me who looked for the fast and easy way out of assigned reading.

Te348 conclusions - from an advertising major

Te348 was the only class that fit my lit requirement to graduate.  I walked in May and needed to take a couple classes this summer to finish up.  I was very apprehensive about taking this class because I knew it would nothing like I’d ever done before.  I felt somewhat confident since it’s called “children’s literature”, how hard could it be?  The first couple books were picture books this was going to be a breeze. 

However now as the session comes to an end I’ve discovered just how wrong I was.  I definitely fell behind at times and had a few inconvenient personal issues come up, but I feel good about my experience.  I really liked some of the books we read, and I heard about a few I might be interested in.  it has been interesting being on the other side of the desk, so to speak, because while I have interacted with teachers my entire life I never really knew what their training was like.  Before this class I imagined teaching degrees as fairly simple and easy to acquire.  After all teachers got in to college and will take classes to prepare them for teaching grade school?  It made no sense to me that it could be difficult.

Listening to my classmates discuss problems that could arise based on the skin color of the girl in a book or what the character’s family life is like never really crossed my mind.  I suppose a lot of what I have to go off of in this class is my personal experience with teachers, and I feel like that is a lot of what college is preparing teacher for.  Sharing these experiences and learning from them so they can be prepared when they finally do get a classroom of their own.

A Family of Non-Readers

The moment I saw the syllabus for this class I panicked and i am sure I was not the only one. I saw all of the papers and reading assignments and I wanted to drop the class immediately. I had no idea how I was going to survive in this class while taking another literature class (in Spanish), working, and helping out at home (which is two hours away). How will i do this? I was sitting in class thinking, I hardly ever read novels or write papers. I made three years through college and never had such a workload that intimidated me and it all boiled down to my reading history. I probably read maybe three or four books (give or take) for the fun of it in my grade school life. Yet everybody else in class talked about the books they read or planned to read soon. Why won't I read for fun?
I do not hate books nor love to watch television, so what am I doing with my time? Working. I grew up working around my country home, then when I was old enough I worked several jobs (at a time) while in high school. The only time I read a book was while in church, the good ole King James Version Bible. Other than that there was no other book I willingly picked up, sat, and read. That was the only book I ever saw my mom read and my siblings i never saw reading either. Everybody had a day full of chores, school work, etc. I look back and I wish that i had read more. I attempted to join a book club, read a book or two, and then stopped. But why? A family of non-readers that is.
My mom always encouraged me to study and that education was important, but i was never taught the joy of literature. Now that i have successfully survived the class i can find the joy in literature. Maybe for my future courses i will actually read the material because i may enjoy it. I doubted my success in this class but i was completely wrong. Maybe there is someone else in the class that felt intimidated the first day but now feels triumphant. Anywho we finally made it through the course!!!!! Yay!

reading time

Ever since I have my own class in Chinese school, I have always tried to save at least about 10 to 15 minutes for just plain reading. Usually, it is one of those activities that children are always bagging for and never wanted to end. Yes, this was when I finally realized how powerful books might be.

Each semester, I would only have about three to five students in my classroom. And most of the times, these children has very little or no Chinese language background. Which is to say, when it comes to reading time, I am reading these Chinese books to those English speaking children. And this is when I find that, maybe, the words in children's books are not always the most important thing. When I read the books to my students, they were very focused. It was a big surprise to me how concentrated they were. I was surprised because they did not know almost any of the things that I read to them. Even though, they would frequently ask me questions about what happened in the story and even mention that it was in a language they don't understand, I found most of the time, they actually had a pretty good understanding of what was going on overall. Maybe it was because the pictures and logic of most stories. Maybe it was just the power of language. Maybe it was just the natural ability of communication. Just like how many of us communicate with our pets, none of our pets really speak our language, and none of us speak their language. However, a lot of time, we could communicate and understand each other. From my interpretation, it is just the same thing with these children.

Personally, I think that not only is having a library in the class is very important, providing children a time to read together or on their own is also very important. Just the atmosphere of reading and learning is very necessary. I don't know how much my students have really gotten from me reading these books in Chinese, but I am sure, it has some level of effect to their Chinese learning.

language learning and children's lit

Ever since I started to teach Chinese at a local Chinese school, I have been looking for appropriate books that can best teach the Chinese school. I think as far as for finding children's literature for educational purposes, it is always hard to find the RIGHT one. Every books has a purpose and every teacher is targeting to find different books. There are all different kinds of literature out there written and designed for different reasons. However I have never really found a one that as all of the elements that I am looking for. After a few years of search I have come to an realization that the best way to may be to write a book myself some day in the future.

Most of the books that I have found were written and designed as textbooks. In another words, it was hard to find language learning books that could really be consider as literature. However, it might have been because that the market for learning Chinese as a Second Language has not yet become so popular, which is to say, there are only so much books out there design for this purpose. As Math has become more and more popular, there are more and more Math related children's literature. Maybe, when one day, learning Chinese has become a trend, writers and publishers will start to consider to write books for Chinese language learning that are not in the form of textbook.

I know that wanting to publish books might sound a lot easier than it truly is, especially with limited knowledge and experience about the field of education and Chinese as a Second Language learning. I believe that one day, I will be able to write and design dream books that has a true plot, setting, characters, etc. while teaching audiences the Chinese language.

In some sense, I think that languages are especially hard to incorporate in literature than any other subjects. 
 

Cinderella ate my daughter-the princess complex

While preparing my application assignment I was talking to Professor Ide and recommended a book to me called “Cinderella ate my daughter”.  I didn’t have time to read it, but I looked through a couple different book reviews about it, and thought it raised some very interesting themes.  Most importantly was the author, Peggy Orenstein’s views on the princess complex that controls almost every American girl from ages 2 to 6.

Orenstein believes that Disney and princess themed merchandise and apparel set young girls up for failure because of unrealistic expectations.  For example the idea of waiting for your “knight in shining armor” or “prince charming” to come take you away to live happily ever after is damaging because it instills the idea the women are judge on their beauty. 

The next phase for little girls is the “tween” at which time to break away from the princess she moves on to the less girlie and sexier Bratz dolls, and so begins beauty and sexy being the most important attributes.  In general the author blames Disney for all the stereotypes and stages little girls go through.  Specifically Orenstein blames the Disney starlets who play the innocent virgin angle on Disney for a couple years and then end up drunk and disorderly or slutty and sending nude pictures (ex: Lindsay Lohan and Selena Gomez)

Orenstein sees little girls as being set down the path of princess turned whore regardless of how well they excel at other important aspects of their lives.  She feels like the culture encourages this behavior from girls that it’s almost a rite of passage for girl to constantly be proving physically they are feminine.

The advice she offers to parents is to say ‘no’ more.

Are children the new head of the household?

According to an article from Brands and Branding Intelligence, an organization about branding, Children influence almost 80 percent of parents’ brand purchasing decisions, and Fifty-eight percent of children across the globe claim they tell their parents what to buy.  This is extremely significant since most children do not actually make the purchase someone else is the buyer.  So how did children become the head of the house?

My first thought is the breakdown of the family.  With divorce rates climbing every year, part-time parents are easily convinced to spoil their child.  Children also realize that they can pit their parents against one another in order to get what they want.  The part-time parents don’t want to be seen as “the mean one” or for “new dad” to buy their kids nicer things. 

Another thought that comes to mind is the idea of “keeping up with the Jones’” which doesn’t fall solely on children or teenagers.  The idea consumerism and constantly having the newest and the best stuff is a product of our parents and our culture.  Adults buy into the same game when they make purchasing decision, so when their children want something because so-and-so has it parents are willing to cave.  Parents will cave because the number one way they compete is who has the best family. 

Finally kids are picky and don’t like to try new things easily, so its understandable if parents get sucked into a brand because otherwise their child won’t eat or do their homework or whatever it is they’re being stubborn about.  I think the old adage goes “spoil the rod not the child” maybe we are being too soft on children.  Children shouldn’t grow up getting whatever they want they learn to work for it, but unfortunately it would seem today’s kids do.

My favorite Book from TE348

Of the six books we read in TE348 this session I definitely enjoyed some more than others.  I did not care for The Three Pigs or Maus because I don’t enjoy books that break the conformity of a book.  Bud, not Buddy and The Book Thief were definitely “teacher books” and reminded me of assigned reading from grade school.  Voices in the Park was pretty good, and I’ll probably give that one to my nephew.  My favorite without a doubt was Hunger Games.

Hunger Games was hands down my favorite and I am reminded of how I felt waiting between Harry Potter books as I wait for the opportunity to start Catching Fire the next installment in the trilogy. 

The main reason I enjoyed the Hunger Games was because of the main characters Katniss, Peeta, and Haymitch.  Katniss was smart, brave, loyal, and stubborn which made her very relatable and likeable.  Peeta’s character was funny and cunning and loyal as we find out he didn’t know she was pretending to be in love.  Haymitch was probably my favorite character overall.  He starts out a slapstick comedic non-character drunk, and ends up being very strategic and helpful. 

I expect more development with Haymitch’s character because he seems too smart and one step ahead of the capital at the end of the first book.  Also the complexity of his character being drunk guarantees his character will continue to entertain me.  I just hope his fate isn’t the same as my favorite Harry Potter characters, Sirius and the Weasley twins.

Being the daughter of a teacher

My mother has been a teacher for 29 years.  She is a special education teacher, and has her master’s degree.  My mother has taken a 14 year-old boy with a 2^nd grade reading level, and by the end of high school he graduated reading at his appropriate age level.  She can do fantastic things as a teacher for her students.  Teaching is definitely her passion.

However…

I am the daughter of that fantastic wonderful teacher that has helped so many students over the years, who had the luxury of being an unpaid teacher’s assistant.  I can honestly say other than actually standing in front of one of her classes and lecturing I have done it all. 

I was a smart kid, so quickly I went from stapling papers, hole punching, and cutting laminating to grading papers, programming and printing interim reports, and baking treats for the class.  I thought couldn’t understand why anyone on the planet would go through that much work or effort to be a teacher.

I quickly determined a young age that teaching was not for me.  I do not possess the patience to handle children, the determination to help them succeed, or the stomach to deal with parents.  I am not a teacher major, but this class has taught me a lot about the actual process to get there.

I know my mother loves her job, and she would tell you it’s worth it.  And you do get summers off!

P.S. if you have children don’t make them sit through meetings or grade papers or staple 100 uncorrelated 5 page packets.