ELAAaron

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**Textbook Survey—English Language Arts **

As you peruse your content area textbook, please complete the following activities and/or questions. You may place your responses on this page.

1. Write a bibliographical entry for the book using APA format.

Burke, J. (2008). //The English teacher companion: a complete guide to classroom, curriculum, and the profession//. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

2. What is the author’s background in education?


 * Teacher at Burlingame High School in California.
 * Author of many books and materials.
 * Consultant to impressive programs.
 * Winner of numerous awards

3. Skim through the Introduction: Teaching English in the Twenty-First Century. What are 2 key insights that you gained?

English education must grow to include many new 21st century skills. This growth must be balanced with timeless aspects of English education—high stakes testing and NCLB are important but so is good teaching.

4. Looking at the Table of Contents, what are the 4 main sections of the book?
 * 1) Foundations
 * 2) New Directions in Teaching English: Implications
 * 3) Issues in Teaching English—Inevitabilities
 * 4) From Becoming to Being an English Teacher

5. Which chapter should you definitely read before you begin the unit project?

Chapter 10.

6. Which chapter will be particularly helpful with planning assessments?

Chapter 11.

7. Look through the Appendices. Which 2 appendices do you think you will find most helpful during student teaching? Why?

New Teacher Checklist and The Timetables of Teaching High School English. I know everything else.

8. In Chapter 2, Four Components of Effective Teaching are explained. What are they? Give an example of each.

1. Construction: Making things. 2. Occupation: Making students present in their English education. 3. Negotiation: Getting students to participate in making decisions about the class. 4. Conversation: Synthesizing ideas from many sources. 9. Of all the chapters in the book, which one interests you the most? Why?

Chapter 7 on teaching writing because I am a good writer, and most people are not good writers. I can fix this.

10. Of all the chapters in the book, which one will you probably not read during this course? Why?

Chapter 21 on the law. I am not so worried about the law.

11. What is one section in particular that you would like to discuss further with your content advisor?

The grammar chapter because who needs grammar anyway?

I will be researching and writing about standards, assessment, and technology in Mathematics and English. I am particularly interested in how standards are used when designing curricula and assessments--high stakes or otherwise--and how the use of technology in Math and English compares. I plan to write 1 big paper that combines all of these ideas. I have more than enough articles to read for all of the topics in both content areas.
 * Session 3:**

“Persistence of the Five-Paragraph Essay”
 * Session 5:**
 * Miller argues that the five-paragraph essay format has become a crutch for teachers and students in the age of high-stakes standardized tests like the SAT and ACT. It stifles creativity by implicitly communicating that writing is necessarily formulaic. Rather than persist in repetitively teaching one way of writing, Miller posits that teachers need to make the writing process more open to individual methods and ideas rather than a one-size-fits-all model.
 * As an avid writer of more-than-five-paragraph essays, I would agree with Miller without reading her essay. However, she effectively demonstrates the problems with making writing formulaic by listing common contradictory requests in an English class: “I want to see your thesis at the end of the first paragraph. You may need two paragraphs to develop your introduction, so I’ll be looking for your thesis in the second paragraph.” Obviously the intent is understood in these statements, but they could be confusing to a student that is used to following the equally foolish recipe for a five-paragraph essay.
 * I will never teach a five-paragraph essay in any of my English classes. I am a proponent of the write-exactly-as-much-as-you-need method of essay writing that allows for creativity while demanding conciseness.

 I. Introduction II. Body i. Summary of the methods, data, and conclusions in the 3 math essays ii. Transition to English essays: Minnesota essay ends questioning what we are trying to teach children. What happens when standards meet a content area that is less structured? iii. Summary of the history and criticism of English standards iv. Transition to assessment: One perk(?) of standards is that they make assessment uniform. i. Summary of math assessment ii. Transition to English assessment: What about assessment in a content area that already is open ended? iii. Summary of aims and difficulties of English assessment i. Summary of technology use and benefit in a math classroom ii. Transition to English technology: What else is technology good for? <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px; margin-left: 1.5in; text-indent: -1.5in;">iii. Summary of using technology in an English class <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">III. Conclusion <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">(All formating errors are due to technology's inability to keep up with my brain...)
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Outline: **
 * 1) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Standards
 * 1) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Massachusetts: Teaching standards means better test scores
 * 2) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Missouri: Teaching standards means better test scores (with flaws!)
 * 3) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Minnesota: Teaching standards means better problem solving with a decline in procedure
 * 1) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">What issues do people have?
 * 2) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Where do those issues come from?
 * 3) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Why are standards good?
 * 4) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Why do some people still hold out?
 * 1) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Assessment
 * 1) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">What do we want to know based on the standards?
 * 2) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">How do we test this?
 * 1) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Building a standardized test in California
 * 2) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Authentic assessment
 * 3) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Technology and assessment—transition
 * 4) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Technology
 * 1) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Visual learners
 * 2) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Access
 * 1) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Research
 * 2) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Access
 * 3) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Games
 * 4) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Appropriate use
 * 5) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">So what?

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">1. If you are looking to have more freedom when grading written assignments, grading via a checklist is a bad idea.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Whatever Session the last meeting with the Content Advisor was: **

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">2. You must be able to defend a grade.

As an English teacher, I plan to be lenient on shorter, reflective assignments but stricter on longer, multi-step assignments like papers. I think that when work is meant to be more professional in an academic sense it is important to teach the students about deadlines. In order to communicate this importance to younger kids like 9th graders, the first bigger assignment will involve newspapers/broadcast news reports so that I can work a conversation about deadlines into the project. For the shorter assignments, I will expect them all to be in a folder or journal and will only collect those periodically during the semester so students can get them done at their leisure, but there will be some accountability.
 * Late Work Policy Paragraphs**

As a math teacher, I will almost always accept late work. I can grade it quickly and practice is always valuable. If I do assign larger projects, they will be due the day of the test and will not be accepted late. However, there will be stages and in class worktime for these projects in order to ensure that students know what they are doing and what is expected of them.

English: Female American Writers at the Turn of the Century
 * Unit Plan Topic and Objectives:**
 * SWBAT articulate the quality of life for a woman at the turn of the century.
 * SWBAT analyze the desires and frustrations of the women in "The Story of an Hour," "The Valley of Childish Things," and "The Yellow Wallpaper."
 * SWBAT compare the three short stories in an in class essay with direct references to the texts.

Math: Trigonometry
 * SWBAT apply the sine, cosine, and tangent functions and their inverses to find lengths and angles in real-world problems.
 * SWBAT analyze equations and graphs of trigonometry functions in order to determine amplitude and period.
 * SWBAT use knowledge of the graphical behavior of the sine and cosine functions to hypothesize and test assumptions about the graphical behavior of the tangent function.

For math, the easiest one to adapt to is the technology scenario because I do not expect the students to use technology outside of the classroom. I would find the class disruption scenarios (assemblies and WKCE) the hardest to adapt to. For math, I might change a group activity to quicker notes if it were necessary to make up the time. I also might give more homework to cover the missing the material. For English I would cover an additional story/poetry in the classes that did meet.
 * Reflection on that stuff**

I am confident in the way I grade math tests and break down more complicated problems into point values to assign partial credit equitably. I would like to find a better way of dividing up percentages for final grades. I don't think I did that fairly last year, and I want to make sure that I adapt to give students a better chance of earning grades that reflect what they know or don't know.
 * Grading Issues**