Literacy blog entry 5

My mom is from New Bern, NC and she says words funny. I noticed at an early age that my mom said “foe-wah” when she meant “four.” She says tons of things in a humorous way, just a kooky word twisting way. I don’t know if this has an effect on the way I teach or if it’s some long buried secret origin of my love of words, but my family goofs on my mom and her sayings and the way she talks. My parents had a huge impact on my love of reading, and because they always felt they were struggling for money, they wanted me to work hard and get a good education so I wouldn’t have those struggles. Things didn’t work out that way, but no one is perfect.

My mom likes reading trashy romance novels and I always saw her reading. I inherited her love of reading crap, but crossed it with my dad’s obsession with baseball, minus the baseball. I remember my dad reading to me when I was a kid because he followed along the words with his middle finger. My mom took me to the comic book store every week. My parents had the time to be with me and they had the money that allowed me to have an obnoxious and expensive hobby. My students don’t have those opportunities and it saddens me. I don’t care if they ever learn what a Dementor is or the Infinity Gauntlet, but I very much want them to experience the joy that I felt when I found out what those things were. Many of their parents want the same thing for their kids that my parents want for me, but due to economics, society, and maybe even genetics the cards didn’t line up in their favor.

Here's a link to an article in the new Our State magazine about Eastern Vs. Western BBQ. A topic my family likes to argue about and I feel it exemplifies my mom's NC Eastern-ness. Also the new Our State has an article by UNCG's own Michael Parker, so there's that too.

http://www.ourstate.com/nc-barbecue-company

Literacy blog entry 4

One of the reasons I like Ernest Hemingway so much is because he helped me make the smart kids look stupid. I took an AP English class in the 12^th grade. I had no business (or “bidness,” as I like to say) being in that class, but the teacher wanted me there. Of course I wanted to be there because I wanted to be good at writing so I could write comic books. I struggled in that class and the other students (all Beta club members) had no problem comprehending the texts. Then we read The Sun Also Rises. Our teacher asked us what Jake’s wound was, and the smarties didn’t know. The other students didn’t understand that Jake’s…uh man-bits had been blown off during the war. I reckon I understood it because my mind is generally in the gutter, but it was one of the few times I ever felt smart.

I’ve read a ton of Hemingway since then, and I don’t always get the meaning or the symbols, but I enjoy the work because it’s written so simply. I hated reading Billy Budd and I hated Nathanial Hawthorne, but I got the Lost Generation. I told that story to my students about the importance of finding that book that makes it click for you and about feeling smart and confident.

Here's a link to an audio slideshow of Hemingway's house in Cuba. Say it out loud as "Koo-Bah," it's more fun that way.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/slideshow/page/0,,2128316,00.html

Literacy blog entry 3

Just so this whole thing isn’t about comic books, lets talk about music. I used to hate country music. My cousins are red necks. This isn’t me being mean, they’ll own up to it. Back in high school, my cousin Hollie took me to school and we had to listen to 104.1 WTQR the whole way to school. I was versed in mid 90s country music because of this, but I wasn’t happy about it. It probably softened me up a bit, but what really made me like country music is the Meat Puppets. The Meat Puppets are a punk band that happens to have a little bit of country twang to their songs. This became the gateway that made it cool and okay for me to like country music.

I felt that it was my job to help my students find their Meat Puppets of books. They all liked reading these books called the Bluford series because it was about things they could identify with. It was about teen pregnancy or gangs, the things they see everyday. Like Ol’ Man Freire says it’s about words creating the world and all that good stuff. A few of the students would try Harry Potter or Twilight, but most of them wanted to read about “real” things. The thing I liked about the Puppets was that their songs were fast and really strange, but that little bit of twang served as a honky-tonk inoculation. They took something I understood, punk music, but added a layer of the unknown. It frustrated me that I couldn’t find my student’s Meat Puppets, so that they could go on to find the joys of Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams, and Lyle Lovett or Hemingway, Monk Kidd, or whatever.

The multimodal component is The Meat Puppet's "Enchanted Porkfist," from their third album Up on the Sun, however, my favorite alumb of their's is Meat Puppet's II.

Literacy Blog entry 2

It all comes back to comics with me. Sigh, you guys’re gonna get so tired of hearing about them, however I will have a blast. Throughout the year I had to attend several staff developments on SIOP. If you had asked me a couple weeks ago what that stands for I could have told you, but right now I’m having a massive brain fart. Anywho, one of the tenets of SIOP is offering instruction for people at every level, specifically ESL students. We looked at this diagram of how ESL students of various reading abilities might read a sentence. The sentence had blocked out words, meaning that a student could not comprehend those particular words. Depending on their ability they could read a few words here and there, but not enough to draw meaning or complete their assignment. Eventually the reading becomes exhausting and the students give up.

The SIOP trainers made their point and I understood what they were saying, but nothing made me understand my students as well as Batman Inc. #3. In the comic, Batman goes to Argentina and meets El Gaucho, an Argentinean super hero, and the writer put some of El Guacho’s thoughts in Spanish. It’s actually a bit more complex than that, but your comic book literacy probably isn’t cranked up to 11 like mine is, so I’m trying to keep it as simple as possible. I know a bit of Spanish, but not as much as I did 10 years ago, so I could pick out words, maybe recognize a verb, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of the context. Then, just like my students, I quit reading El Gaucho’s thoughts. I gave up just like them, because it became too frustrating. I still don’t always know how to motivate them, or myself for that matter, but I will remember that when I am teaching next year, and I will at least understand where they are coming from.

The multimodal component is a link to Comicsalliance.com's Batman Inc.#3 annotation which shows just how in-depth and complex this goofy super hero comic book actually is. Plus, it offers the translated thoughts of El Gaucho!

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/03/14/batman-incorporated-3-annotations/

Literacy blog entry 1

I’ve wanted to be a comic book writer since the second grade. I remember sitting in class and reading Spectacular Spider-Man#144 and looking at this panel of Spider-Man doing a somersault, and for some reason, it all clicked for me. I knew I would never grow up to be Spider-Man, but I could write his adventures. For the life of me I can’t figure out how I came to this conclusion when I was 7 or 8 years old, I wasn’t, nor am I, particularly clever. I do know that it has guided my decisions based on how I live my life, dress, spend my time, and the fact that I write for fun. This was one of those days in class where I finished my work early and I could sit and read. Ever since then my main goal in life has been to finish my work, so I can read comic books. We won’t go in to the lameness of that, as I don’t have a ton of space, lets just call it an obsession and leave it at that. I need to hurry up and finish because I have a nice stack of graphic novels waiting on me.

I’ve struggled with how to motivate my students, and I realized how wide the gulf was between us when I remembered I have been writing comic book scripts since the 8th grade. I write for fun. To them, writing was like being locked away in a gulag. Since I wanted to be a comic writer I sought out online advice on how to become a better writer and comic writers kept saying “read anything you can get your hands on,” so I do. Sadly, I had students read their first books in my class. You don’t have to go around the world to experience culture shock.

My multimodal component is simply the cover of Spectacular Spider-Man#144.