Final Blog Post

During our last class session we talked about the syllabus and what we accomplished during the semester in TE 448. We covered the definitions of stereotypes versus generalizations which I have learned, throughout this course, that I have misused these words in my writing. We covered identity and self discovery when discussing different cultures and religions throughout the novels we read. These issues of self discovery allowed me to think of what I consider to be my own culture and religion and how important those are to me. We covered the insider/outsider debate and how literature from different views can make the reader review the work as quality literature or not quality literature. I have never thought about the author’s point of view before when reading a book, and this debate allowed me to analyze what is quality literature to me. In our final project we were allowed to chose books to critically analyze in our own way. I really enjoyed this assignment because even if someone may not agree 100% with our review we were allowed to back it up with what we believe is quality literature not what someone else believes.

Another big portion of our class was blogging. Before this class I had never created a blog on Google that my other classmates could respond to. I loved reading my classmates blogs and seeing their opinions on different issues we discussed in class. Through my own blog writing, I was able to construct and organize my thoughts in a professional way because I knew that they were going to be public on the internet. For me, I know that during class I had things I wanted to talk about that I did not know exactly how to bring up during discussion. This blog allowed me to formulate my thoughts and allow others to read what I had to say.
Finally, we had to write many questioning the text papers on different novels. When going into my first QTT paper I had no idea where to start. I had never written a paper like this before and I had lots of trouble trying not to answer my own question. However, as the papers progress I believe I got better with understanding why we were writing papers like this. As teachers, we will have to bring up questions that allow for thought provoking discussions in our classrooms. These questions will not have a straight answer because the author is not present, and it is up to our students to bring their own thoughts and opinions to the discussion. It is not the teachers’ responsibility to answer the question.

All I all, I really enjoyed this class. It opened my eyes to literature that I did not know even existed. I had never read books on disabilities, GLBT, Asian-American…etc. This class forced me to critically analyze professional articles and books. Before this class I would have just read through these books and not thought anything of them. However, I did more analyzing and reflecting on pieces of literature in this class than I have in my entire life. I would recommend this class to any future teacher because I feel that it is very important to include many different types of literature into you classroom to make every student feels safe, comfortable and happy to come to school everyday.