Bolg #3

Gee: Good video games allow players to be not just passive consumers but also active producers who can customize their own learning experiences. (208)

Nicoll: This immediately interested me. As I read this sentence I thought Gee was officially a nut because how could you possibly let students decide what they wanted to learn? Nothing would get done. But as I finished this paragraph, Gee talks about the students being insiders verses outsiders. I realized that Gee wanted the students to be included in what they learned. In this section, Gee is talking about game companies encouraging players to create their own “maps” and therefore playing the game more successfully. I’m not going to say I completely understood the map analogy, but it seems to me that what he is saying is that game companies want players to create their own ways to play the game and not have all players reach the end the same way. I think the way this translates into the classroom is by letting students choose what book to read from a pre-determined selection. If the students actively participate in what they are being taught, then they are learning, whether they like it or not. Another way to do this is by letting the students lead the discussion. Let them bring in topics that they found relevant to the reading or experiment and let the discussion grow from that point. Asking a class “what do you think about this specific thing” may not be the best way to get a response. The class may not have seen things from the same perspective and they may not be able to answer you r question. However, asking, “what did you think” opens up the discussion floor and the student may surprise you with what they come up with. What Gee is saying is that good teachers will allow the students to have their own thoughts and the good teacher will allow these thoughts to be developed in a way that best benefits the student. If the student isn’t engaged, then they aren’t paying attention; and if they aren’t paying attention, they can’t be learning. Letting them “customize their own learning experiences” gets them to pay attention.

Pratt: I use [contact zone] to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other… (1)

Nicoll: Pratt’s definition reminds me of the meetings of teachers and students. Too often, teachers try to teach on their terms and the students try to learn on theirs. The two planes rarely meet. Teachers, being teachers, have a level of literacy that is obviously much higher than the students. Teachers need to be able to bring themselves down to the level of the students. My father has been a junior high school teacher for almost thirty years. He also thinks it’s funny to listen to rap music. One day he was discussing the latest Eminem song with a student in the hallway. Another teacher asked him how and more importantly why he was able to do that. My father said that he refuses to watch the shows that the kids watch and he usually doesn’t like their movies, but he usually likes their music. That is his way of relating to the students. It is how he gets into their contact zone. Pratt says that Guaman Poma got into Phillip III contact zone by learning his language. Unless it is a foreign language class, teachers generally speak the same language as their students. And students probably aren’t going to go to Blockbuster or Netflix and order a movie from when their teachers were young. It falls to the teacher to enter the students contact zone. If listening to Eminem is going to endear students to the teacher and lets the student see that maybe the teacher does know what they are talking about, then the teacher is just going to have to listen to Eminem. Just like Guaman Poma had to learn some Spanish to converse with Phillip III.

Russell: Instead of viewing writing as a complex and continuously developing response to s specialized, text- based, discourse community, highly embedded in the differentiated practices of that community, educators came to see it as a set of generalizable, mechanical “skills” independent of disciplinary knowledge. (5-6)

Nicoll: I think this is linked to the discussion we had last week in class. Unfortunately most teachers see the English class as the place where students should learn how to write. Teachers of other subjects don’t think that they should have to teach grammar and sentence structure and comma placement. And to some extent they are right. By the time a student reaches the level where they are required to write research papers, the science teacher should not have to explain the difference between a colon and a semi colon. However, it is not incumbent upon the English teacher to demonstrate how to write a document based essay for History class. That job belongs to the history teacher. While basic grammar and writing skills are learned in English class in elementary school, the high school English teacher has other things to worry about and their own curriculum to teach. It isn’t going to affect the grade on the History Regents for the History teacher to take one class or even one week going over the particulars of writing DBQ Essays. In fact, it will probably raise the grade because the student will know how to approach the essay. The English teacher should not have to bear the burden of teaching how to write for all subjects. Each individual subject teacher must teach how to write for their own class.

I liked this format of journal because it allowed me to reflect on what I felt was important instead of summarizing how I felt about the whole reading. This was much more focused and helped me stay on my point because I had a very specific reference. I also allowed me to easily relate to the other readings. Since I knew what interested me in the first reading, I could look for similar ideas in the other readings.