I'm Grounded...

So I decided to check my Instagram instead of doing the dishes on time today, so my mom grounded me from my phone. Once I whined and annoyed both of my parents for a decent amount of time, I realized I wasn't going to get it back until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. During the first hour or two, I found my really old phone, which is useless except for its radio, which was good because I was already starting to feel music deprived. Then we went to this huge outlet mall, and I got lost ten minutes into the trip. My family didn't even notice I was gone until 45 minutes later (Thanks mom and dad!), and they came back to find me sitting in the food court feeling USELESS without my phone. I felt awkward asking to use someone else's, so I sat there and waited instead. Later on, I had some random question about caramel apples (we had just bought some), and I couldn't Google search the answer. THEN, I needed to calculate the price of a shirt after a discount, but I couldn't multiply it out in my head. I didn't have my bulky graphing calculator that I use at school or my phone calculator either, and I ended up needing to ask my dad to calculate the price for me. When we finally got home, I had to go log into my email, Facebook, and Instagram because I could no longer receive notifications to tell me when I needed to check something, and I had to actually get on my laptop to check it. I couldn't Snapchat my daily activities, talk to my friends over Facebook Messenger, post on my Instagram, Google search my many stupid questions, do simple math problems, call my parents when I lost them, or listen to music. By the time we got home and I'd finished checking all of my various social media accounts, I felt completely useless. And I still do. I've been grounded from my phone for 5 hours, and I'm dying. I've become so dependent on this one piece of technology that I feel like I'm missing an arm when I don't have it with me. Earlier in the summer, I thought I'd be able to do the digital detox thing without any problem whatsoever. Now? I still think I might be able to do it, but it's definitely going to be a challenge. I know we're supposed to be done using the blog, but I needed to rant, and I didn't have my phone to help me do so. And to those of you who have sent me any text messages, snapchats, or direct messages on instagram, and I haven't replied, now you know why!

Wish me luck,

- Lina <3

AF: Subscribe to Remind 101

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AF: Turtles DO have it figured out REVISED

I have received several emails asking about a test.  Of course there will be a test (!) but not on your first day back, and not without some time to talk about ALL of the books (even the one you did not read).

I will return your notebooks to you on the first day, UNGRADED, but checked in.  I am looking at everything, and forming an impression of you as a writer and a thinker (adding to what I know about you already from the blog), but I am not grading anything right now.  Your ticket into the class was the work, so I'm finding out who did the work thoroughly, and who just slapped it together.  Your summer work will be a topic of conversation between us at some point during the first semester, and it will be graded before your first real report card in January.  Every portion of the summer homework is worth 100 points:  blog, Postman, Huxley, Carr/Thompson.  That's 400 total, so it is significant, but I have learned that trying to get all of these graded in the two weeks before school is a losing proposition, and puts me behind from Day One.  I'm not doing that any more.  I will be fair, and I respect your work.  That's all that should matter today.

You will write an on-demand essay on Friday, September 5th that I will score immediately, and your test on all four books will be on  Friday, September 12.  By September 19, you will have an essay score, a test score and several participation events in the grade book.  (For those of you who are coming to me from Colln/Phinizy, I also use the 3P Grading system.  For everyone else, you may want to read up about this.  This will be my third year using 3P; it is just a better system.  It doesn't make Portal Surfers happy, but 3P is more fair and more transparent than the traditional system that I used for the first 12 years of my teaching career. Google it.)

Anyway, from Monday through Thursday (9/8-9/11), there will be two things happening:  you will be learning and practicing how to work in my classroom, and you will be reviewing and discussing the summer work, and helping your peers understand the main points of the book they did not read.  You will use your own notebooks and the texts themselves to look more closely at all of the ideas we have encountered.

Have you ever read our English Language Arts standards?  The CONTENT of what we read is important because that's why we read and write, but what we work on is WRITING, READING, SPEAKING, and LISTENING.  So the tests I write do check to see whether you read and understood, but mostly whether you can take what you read and explain it, discuss it, synthesize it.

Writing is thinking made visible.  Orwell said that if you don't write well, it's probably because you can't think well, and if you can't think well, "don't worry.  Somebody else will do your thinking for you." Scary, isn't it?  But if your thoughts are naive, immature or lazy, your writing will reflect that by being repetitive, superficial, and incoherent.  If you can think a clear thought, and put that thought down on paper in clean, vigorous English, you are going to do well.  But in any case, don't worry.  I've seen every kind of student come through my classroom. I've had brilliant, brilliant kids who have gone on to do big things in the world, and I have had very mediocre students who have ALSO gone on to do big things in the world  The junior year is important, but it is not the end of the line for you.  Room 508 is just one stop along the way, and whoever you are and whatever you know already, I'm going to help you improve.

PS:  I have recently heard stories about kids celebrating (bragging) that they got into this AP class. Stop that.  Anthony Sayas said it well the other day -- it is not a big deal to get in the class.  It really isn't; it's not worth bragging about.  It just means you did the work, and for the record, the work I received is not uniformly good.  Again, this is not unusual.  If you are willing to do the work to be in this class, I welcome you.  But some of you are going to have extra work to do because you are starting off standing in a hole.

Made the class :)

Interested on who's making the class. Everyone check your email and post here if you're in the class.
:)

AF: I read this in a day

It was super fun.

Zombies and Communication

     With Clive Thompson's book about the great positive attributes of technology, I couldn't help but see what he was trying to say about the internet's communication skills. We are basically connected to everything on the web. We connect with people from across the globe to people we see at school. It's a phenomenon that I feel stitches the citizens of Earth together.
     With the power of the internet, we can actually connect with people for basically any genre no matter how niche the topic on hand is. I have my very own experience with this technology with just communicating with others about the ideas of a zombie apocalypse. We basically discussed our ideas on what would happen and if we had our own empires, what would be the best government during this time period? It got so engrossing that we basically role-played as to what would we do in Zombie Apocalypse. I now basically have an incredibly long document on each person's actions from Anthony Sayas, who would become a medic to prove his worth to the survivors, to Hayden Nguyen, who wanted to start his own religion that would attract the helpless survivors who would help him raise his own empire.  It was incredibly interesting with how each person would react to this invasion.
     Without the internet, we wouldn't have the ability to connect with others like this. It allowed us to connect without having to meet up for every time we wanted to brainstorm our ideas. It gave us a central and clear way to express our thoughts and I wouldn't want to lose this unique opportunity.
     Hayden became a dictator later on....

Read a Book Instead

        My dad was just giving my siblings and I a speech on how we spent the whole summer playing video games and watching television. He said we were becoming lazy and that we were becoming too dependent on technology. Our conversation then became about how they used to learn and spend their time when he was a kid (one thing always leads to another with him).
         My dad was born in Guatemala and he reminded us that they aren't really big on education over there. He came to America when he was about nine years old. He said that when he came over here, it was a lot of work. If he ever needed an answer to anything, he had to walk three miles to the nearest library because my grandparents could not help him. He had to really think about what he was reading and sometimes used books to understand books. He got so used to reading so much, he went to the library on weekends to read just for fun, He said this made him feel smart. As the years progressed and technology advanced, he slowly became sucked into the world of technology. He started going to technology more to solve his problems. Now, my dad is always using his phone. Any question he has, whether its to spell something or to lookup an answer to a homework problem for one of my siblings, he goes to Google. Actually, lately he's been using my mom's phone. She has an iPhone and he likes that Siri answers him. He says that Siri always knows the answer. He stated that he now feels just as dumb as he was when he first got to the U.S. He wants to stop using technology so much, but he feels like he can't because he became too dependent on it. It's no longer a choice for him to use his phone and Google but a necessity.
         I realized that I do this too. I always go to Google on my phone or laptop when I don't understand something. Another thing is, I haven't been to a library or used a book for research in quite some time. I think Tuesday was the first time I've been in the library in months. I went to get homework done because it was hard for me to concentrate at home with television tempting me to watch. It didn't make that much of a difference since I still had my phone. After a while I realized I needed to stop, especially since I was finishing Amusing Ourselves to Death. All I did was look at the cover page and I felt so ashamed. Anyways, now my dad has made it clear that he wants us to go to the library more often and just pick up a book to read at home so we can actually do something productive and educating.
       
Just something I wanted to share. Well it was fun blogging and reading about what others thought. I enjoyed it very much. I've learned so much and know that what we read will always stay with me. I'm gonna try and step back from using technology as much as I can. Maybe I'll just read a book instead.