The beginning of a thought adventure!

Allow me to welcome myself aboard. I am currently in the program for Secondary Education, Integrated Language Arts at Kent State University. So far, I have had an excellent experience gaining more and more anticipation of beginning my profession as a teacher!

Today in my Multi-Modal Literacies class, we learned many examples of things we can use in the classroom and one really stuck out to me. It is called "List Six" in which students must answer in list form. For example, "list six characters in the novel." It included the students forming a circle while one remained in the middle. The middle student closes his or her eyes as the students in the circle pass around an object. When the middle students says, "stop," the student in the circle with the object in hand must answer the question posed by the middle student. If answered wrong, students switch places and the game continues. This can be used as a review game before a quiz or test.

My friend Randi, Mike and I were talking about how we could tweek this exercise because students may have trouble thinking of questions. Also we figured that this game could be used for short answer questions rather than lists. We would have the teacher could put several questions into a hat that students can pull out or students could even write down review questions that they may not know the answer to into the hat to provide answers for them anonymously. I think I will definitely use this in my classroom!

Today our class also discussed a controversial topic. Should professional people have personal pages such as Myspace or Facebook? I know a lot of people do indeed have these sorts of pages to stay in touch with old friends, relatives, etc. I used to have a Facebook, but I deleted the account because it was really consuming my life. I think networks like these become almost an addiction because we want to "stalk" other people's pictures, latest news and gossip, and again keep in touch. But I think if you get to the point where you intend on spending 10 minutes on there which turns into an hour, that is a problem. And that was my problem! I could have been doing homework for class or exercising!!*** I highlight exercising because it is so hard for me to make time for exercising, I am so busy studying and working, that exercise has not been a major priority lately. And to think, I spent that hour on Facebook...

Well those are my thoughts for today. I have two analytical papers to write this week. One about Pere Goriot and one about William Wordsworth.