SED 445 Blog

When I was in high school, writing just was not my thing. I hated the closed-minded limitations of essay writing and the strict regulations that we were expected to follow. I feel like I never really learned how to write in high school, what I learned was how to plug-in information into a 5-paragraoh essay formula, that was never actually taught, but rather assigned. Reading Christensen’s chapter on Writing Essays forced me to relive some of the pretty awful experiences I had in high school but also helped me see that there’s a better way to do things. It also made me wish so badly that one of my English teachers had read this chapter and done what Christensen writes about.  A lot of my teachers simply assumed we knew what to when it came to writing papers, and a few even acknowledged the fact that we didn’t but they didn’t have time to go over it during class. Looking back, I think that my teachers just didn’t want to deal with teaching something they felt we should al...

When I think about standards and standardized testing, I immediately cringe because these were things that haunted me throughout my public school experience. It started with the NECAPs in elementary school which was just plain awful for second grade Allie because I couldn’t sit still for the life of me. My teacher told us the test was very important and to do our best but I had never taken anything like it before. I remember feeling like a fish out of water. I had to take the NECAPs again in fifth and eight grade. I remember feeling so lucky all the years in-between because I hated the testing so much. I hated being stuck in one room, forced to sit in silence, not allowed to go to the bathroom, or even read a book when I finished. It felt like torture. It was especially bad when I got to high school because as a junior, we had to take the NECAP but it became a graduation requirement – if you didn’t pass you didn’t graduate. I failed the math portion my junior year and had to retake it...

I went to high school in Cranston where the population was pretty diverse. I never felt like I was the majority as someone who is white and there were plenty of people that were Hispanic, African American, and Asian descent. So this being said, I heard a lot of different languages every single day. It never bothered me, and I never really thought about it until reading Christensen’s chapter on Language and Power. Obviously, I knew already that English is seen as the primary language in America and everyone is expected to be proficient in English. I didn’t occur to me that people who spoke different languages were oppressed in schools because that just wasn’t my experience. I even had some teachers learning words in languages like Filipino, just to talk to the students in their language.  What also didn’t make sense to me is that the chapter noted on the fact that several classrooms in America have banned Spanish but in most schools it’s also a requirement to take a foreign lan...

In “The Politics of the Paragraph,” Michelle Kenney highlights the structure of writing that is taught in schools and the problematic repercussions of formulas that students are taught. 5 paragraph essays are something I struggled with all throughout high school. In the beginning of the piece, Kenney talks about her student Erica, and I identified with her so much reading this. Not in the outside of the classroom problems so much, but the fact that I felt like such a crappy writer because I couldn’t fit all of my ideas into a 5-paragraph essay formula. I was told my ideas were too broad and I needed to narrow my ideas down. Less is more sometimes, blah blah blah. It gives me skills when I think about my high school English classes. You would think that these formulas would make it so much easier to write papers, but for me, and I’m sure several other students all over, it makes it so much harder. There’s a quote from Kenney’s piece that really stuck out to me – “ Systems like these en...

Coming into this class at the beginning of the semester, I had never heard of The Poet X.  I knew it was a book and assumed it was just like any regular other novel. It wasn't until last week that I realized it was a book of poems when I went out to buy it. I'm going to be completely honest, I have a...complicated relationship with poetry and tend to shy away from it from past experiences. I took a poetry class at CCRI, and the professor assigned us some poems that even after she told us what it meant, I still had no idea. Like, the whole class made absolutely zero sense and I struggled really bad. Before this class, throughout my public education, there had been numerous poetry units that always ended in writing my own poem, which I always felt awful at. It's definitely not my most skilled writing area, and after this college course I sort of just said to myself, "If this is what poetry is like, I'm all set!" Obviously, I've had to read poetry in othe...

The change of seasons in my family is always something we celebrate. When winter turns to spring, we’re all overjoyed at the fact that there’s no more shoveling snow to be done and that nicer weather is finally coming. I’m probably the only weirdo in the world who actually likes the cold weather, but by the end of winter, I have to admit I’m pretty over it. My dad jokes that he likes it because he can finally turn the heat off and stop paying so much for the gas bill. Spring is always that awkward in-between of being freezing in the morning, but weirdly hot in the afternoon. And it rains. So. Much. Everyone loves a good rain day, but too much and our basement gets all wet and damp and I have to wear rain boots just to do laundry! Besides that, spring time usually means spring cleaning around the house, which is something we all look forward to.  When spring turns to summer, my mom and I always go out shopping for a new bathing suits and beach gear. The first warm day, like 70 d...