I’m going to just write

Hey. It’s me. I know no one will read this, but sometimes that comforting. I can decide who will read this: Me, Marily, people I tell, or just random people who happen to stumble on this. My goal is to get one random person before next year. I don’t know how that will happen, but I can hold on to my hope as long as I need to.

This winter has been crazy for me and probably everyone around me as well. I’m getting more and more involved with education and its getting me rather excited and rather afraid; I can’t imagine how hard it is for some people. But do I have to? Or should I only think of myself? I could always just reflect and see how well I do, but honestly sometimes I freak myself out way too much and get scared —so scared that I sabotage myself. It’s crazy right? Thinking about something so much that it kills you from the inside, scares you from every angle around you, has you ducking from all of the shit that’s about to fly over your head. That’s what everyone is saying at least. Teachers, students becoming teachers, online users; they are all saying that becoming a teacher is hard as hell and I believe it, and it scares me. It scares me because then I ask myself if I’m up to the task or if I’m just doing this because I have no other idea what I’ll ever be good at.

Then, Marily fixes me up again. She reminds me that I’ll be great at whatever I do and that I’m a natural born teacher. Well, she doesn’t say I’m a natural born teacher — it’s implied.

I think I am though. In 12th grade I told my whole AFJROTC class that my greatest dream was to become a great father. Of course there were a couple of “aww”s being thrown around after that, but what made it special to me was that my instructor wasn’t taken aback by it. They were okay with it —whatever that means — and he went to ask the next kid what their dream was. My greatest dream is to become a great father because I was feeling down that day, confused on what it mean to be a great father. Personally, I was going through a rough time and I wanted some guidance on what to do, but because of my situation, I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to go to and ask. My father I shunned because social pressure and the panopticon is a huge problem for everyone. Of course I’m ashamed of it, but now our relationship is better. And my grandfather, I hated — perhaps rightfully so — and so I could never go to him. I was stuck and all I could think about it how I need a person to just be their for me and hold me and tell me what I need to do to solve all of my problems. In some cheesy movie (the name of which I can’t remember now) made me feel all gushy and reminded me that fathers do exist. And so I decided that I wanted to be the best father I could be.

Now, this is how I decided to be a teacher as well. I initially enrolled at UCSB to be a biologist, but now I decided that career path wasn’t for me. However, being a teacher? That allows me to complete my greatest dream in life. Isn’t that amazing? And I get paid for it. It really is the whole package I guess. No, not “I guess,”  I know. I know I’m going to be a great teacher, and I’m excited. I’m excited to kick it out of the park and teach kids and help them become confident and be there for them just like I wanted someone to be there for me as a child. There is something so special when you give a child the chance to believe in themselves. I did that with Mario this week. On Friday I was grading a student’s paper at the city’s high school and I told him that his paper was amazing, and offered to give him advice on how to improve it so that he might get the highest grade possible. Granted, it wasn’t magazine worthy, but it had amazing ideas and analysis. I could see the potential in him and I let him know that I saw it in his paper. What got to me was when I told Mario that his paper had amazing ideas in it he said surprisingly, “Really?”

It may not be much — you had to be there — but there was such a sense of surprise and excitement in his voice that it let me know he hadn’t heard this in a long time. That’s heartbreaking to me. Even more so since I know he can do this great work now. Now I know that I will do my absolute best to boost the confidence of every student that sets foot in my classroom — because they try their damn hardest to just stay alive at these times. My classroom will be a place they can grow; grow tall like the beautiful flowers they are.

So yeah, my winter has been crazy, exciting, fun,and stressful. I have learned a lot about myself and I have learned that I can’t do it alone. Just as I have had my partner Marily to hold me up, I will hold others up to the level of confidence that they need to succeed in life.

Here is your song today

Th;log 9?

This week our group presentation were due. While I learned many things about sentences (my topic), I am not so sure I learned very much about anything else. I guess I was just too nervous with how I well of a job I will do with presenting my part of the PowerPoint. However hedged language may have stuck with me (haha). Basically what I learned about hedged language is that you want to use it whenever you don't want to sound arrogant/unprofessional about a certain topic. It entails making your claims less “harsh” by including words that give the chance for some Leeway in the discussion. For example, you might hear someone say, “Breaking bad is the best show ever!” However, if you want to correctly state your opinion, you should say, “ Breaking bad may be the best show ever!” I was actually curious whether or not this rule applied to every claim. Zack clarified that you use hedged language whenever you are talking in more of a soft science area (politics, psychology, the humanities), however you will state with one hundred percent certainty your claim in any hard science (calculus, biology, economics). Other presentations such as the apostrophes and semicolons were fun and interesting too, just for some reason the only presentation besides my own about complete and incomplete sentences was the hedged language one.

Song of the week: Not today!

Переводы

I learned that a lot of the things that I see today are translations. Basically everything that I’ve read is a translation of some kind. By taking information form one source and changing it to fit into another genre, you get a different delivery from the same information. This is kind of cool because it gives the opportunity for much more expanded thought. For instance, you can take a new technology you heard that they were working on in an article online and integrate it into your new sci-fi short story that you’ve been working on for the last 3 weeks. This is great in the sense that you can apply pretty much anything from any genre into something you can use for another purpose. Are last WP was completely focused on making translations from various sources, in our case it was a scholarly article. I translated my article into a children’s book and cooking recipe. This was rather easy because I knew the common moves and conventions of the genres I was translating to. Children’s books are always ‘dumbed down’ from the younger audience, but at the same time an important factor of the book’s is to keep the attention of the kids, so that was the hardest part. The recipe was basically using the same format with some obscure ingredients for the animals, so that was pretty easy to. The thing I used to connect these pieces were the topic of the scholarly article I choose, which was the diet of animals. Basically the most important thing I have learned from the past couple weeks is that conventions and moves of genre’s are like building blocks, and if you have the basic information, you can insert it into the frame, and you have yourself a new piece.

If you like music, maybe you will enjoy this, like me.

Pb3a: Finding out what lions eat.

                Everyone likes cats, right? If not you probably like dogs. And if not them either, maybe some like ferret or something. The point is that all sane people like animals and enjoy some type of furry or scaly creature. I would like to make my Pb3a into a translation of the scholarly article about the diets of animals “Carbon isotopes ratios of bone apatite and animal diet reconstruction,” into a nice playful story book for children and an interesting recipe for some adult’s pets.

                 Kids grow up dreaming of playing with lions or dolphins or even elephants. Likewise many adults would love to have a pet lion too. I always just imagined me feeding my pet crocodile the leftover broccoli that I didn’t like under the table when my parents weren’t looking. Now that I’m older I think to myself, “What do crocodiles actually eat?” I’m 110% sure that many other kids have asked what certain animals eat, and many parents probably said the simple answer of meat or vegetables.  But with my interpretation of the scholarly article by Sullivan and Kruegar, I’d present their knowledge of animal diets into almost like an educational picture book. This would have like pop-outs and bright colors and short sentences that almost every single 4^th grader wants to read in his free time. The whole purpose of this would to educate the children about actual animals or plants their favorite animals eat. This could be accomplished with sentences like “Carl the crocodile crunched on his crisp tiny crustaceans,” or, “Larry the lion loves licking his fresh lamb.” Anything that uses simple rhetorical elements such as metaphors or alliteration because they attract the attention of new readers.

                 For adults I’d have to take another approach to the animal diet. When people think of their animals they think of how cuddly and fun they are to play with, and for an animal to be active, they must be fed well. I was thinking of making like an article from Pet smart or something that gives recipes for great meals for their fluffy cat or beautiful dog. Something I might write would be like, “Add two cubes of salmon meat for your little precious cat because it boosts flavor while adding the extra nutrition they need!” It can even go further and talk about how the proteins increase muscle mass or even give a nice sheen to the cat’s fur. This would aim for the adult audience, pretty much no discrimination in age because all ages have furry little creatures that they want to take care of to the best of their ability. The whole point would show the connection between the animal’s natural diet and what you can feed them to give them the best quality of life they can get—which is what every pet owner really wants.

To create an effective piece for a certain audience, you have to pay attention to what they want to hear. Kids aren’t going to want to hear how the color and thickness of your animal’s poop might allude to a sickness that they have. Similarly adults already know that lions eat meat and giraffes eat leaves.  So I plan to make a story book about what animals eat for the children and an a recipe for pet food for adults.

Thlogging

WP2 was due this week and I have never been so confused in my life. But at the same time I realized that I learned a lot about moves—yet again. This time however It was different. This time I finally understand how moves can impact the writing and emphasize their own unique style, which in this case is their discipline under which they study. In our projects we were tasked with comparing two different disciplines and a news source and discover the similarities and differences between them. I discovered that when you look very closely at two disciplines they differ in the fundamental way that they interpret their data. The reason this is important is because it relates to their style. And one’s style is solely based upon a collection of moves that they make commonly. In Cumming’s paper I commented on his analysis of his data and how it was tailored to his practiced discipline (following the regular conventions of the discipline wink-wink). Finally we saw how everything meshed together into one big new style of writing, the news source I identified. This news source borrowed conventions from the scholarly article from Cumming’s research while salting the potato with their own. This is what makes up news article’s genre. Even though they all cover the same topic, they all have different approaches and audience that ultimately affect their conventions, moves, and motives.

By the way, the song of the week will be known for centuries. 

Bob Ross' sick moves

So the moves that were contained in the videos were very soft voices—well except for family guy—and everyone was talking to you as if you were new and had no understanding about the topic. It is an instructional video so that actually makes a lot of sense. Something about Bob Ross’ videos that I noticed is his adjectives; I never knew that trees could be happy. But then again his happy little trees are his moves. With Walt Disney’s video expresses the individual styles of each painter on how their idea and interpretation of each of the subjects effects the resulting paintings. It’s almost like when you write about something, you include your own moves and interpretation that affects your analysis and portrayal of what you see.

Online class journal

One aspect of my paper that I feel as if I did well on this time was my organization, I struggled really hard last time with it because i wasn’t really sure where everything was supposed to go. I might still be rather off with my organization, but I feel better than last time.

The comments I received yesterday were rather critical, but I think they really helped me. Carly asked if I really thought my title is interesting--not sure if the title is that important-- but I felt like when i gave it a new title the attitude of the paper almost changed. Bernice also commented about my organization a couple times which helped remind me to really review my paper to see if even I feel like it’s worth turning in.