Mind Blowing Quote of the Week

The Terminator Movie

Studio executives wanted OJ Simpson to play the Terminator. Mel Gibson, Tom Selleck, and Michael Douglas were also considered. Originally the Terminator was supposed to look like an average man, someone who could blend in with the crowd. James Cameron thought OJ was "too nice" to be taken seriously as a killer cyborg.


MIND BLOWN

credits for this mind blowing quote go to cracked.com 30 Mind-Blowing (True) Facts About Famous Movie Scenes

Inspiration I had while reading Nonfiction Matters

Midnight on a frozen bridge. Under the phosphorescent street lights the the falling snow shone bright against the black backdrop of the night. It was like the world ended where one side of the bridge began and the other ended. The sound of rushing water churned continuously on, the only sign that this small world was still moving forward. That time hadn’t stopped still.

Literary Essay_ A Classroom of One's Own

A Classroom of One’s Own

           

            As scary as it sometimes seems, I will one day have a classroom of my own. I will have the eyes of dozens of children and students trained upon me and expecting ME to be the authority figure, to teach them something. It terrifies me, but that’s mostly because I haven’t done it yet. I haven’t had to teach an entire class how to write. Hell, I’ve never taught anyone how to write so how am I supposed to know how to start now. For me the prospect of teaching writing is like “learning a sport entirely with coaching and no actual play.” I know all the little tricks to writing, but I’ve never practiced imparting that wisdom to another person. By the way that particular quote comes from Nystrand, but I didn’t read that. I found it in a very inspirational little paper by Larson and Maier. Larson was observing the extraordinary classroom of Maryrita Maier, a teach r who believes that “all her students were fundamentally authors [who] contributed to an overall atmosphere of excitement, perhaps even a magical enthusiasm for writing.” This belief led Maier to create a classroom where writing wasn’t some assignment that you had to complete because the teacher told you to. It wasn’t so heavily structured that there was only one thing to write about or even one way to write about it. Her classroom was an experiment in giving students a voice in their writing by making it a cooperative and ever changing game between her students and each other.

            If I was choosing a model for how I’d like to build my classroom one day, it would be like Maier’s. I’d want my students to not groan when I tell them that they have a new writing assignment to do. I want them to be so excited about writing that my biggest problem would be to get them to stop writing. I want them to experience the joy of expressing themselves through the medium of writing and to enjoy it with each other.  One might think that I have already a wealth of knowledge for how to structure an English class through all the years of schooling that I have had. But I have never had a class like Maier’s. My English class’s never inspired me to pick up writing as a form of entertainment. In many ways my English classes actually turned me away from writing. It wasn’t until college that I have began to see writing as a valid and enjoyable way to express myself. Sadly, I am not alone in this view. Many of my fellow peers have their own accounts of horror stories about writing that make them shudder in a fear that is traditionally reserved for the boogey-man. I remember my first English class in community college. The gray colored walls that lacked any flyers or posters to liven up the mood. The dim lighting and the rows of disinterested students facing and trying not to make it apparent that they were sleeping while the elderly professor with receding white hair talked, and talked, and talked , and talked. About what I could no longer tell you. I do remember from the class one piece of literature that makes me scared even to this day. VIRGINIA WOOLF’S A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN. This book was boring, it made no sense, and what’s worse is I had to pretend that I knew what I was talking about while writing a huge essay about the stuff that I didn’t understand. A great big thank you to Spark Notes is needed for helping me get past that one. I couldn’t read or write about this piece of literature because it didn’t interest me and that’s a problem that I often hear about from my colleagues.

            Maier’s classroom had the students actively writing about things that they liked, that inspired them. They were encouraged to share their own personal lives and the teacher even shared hers in return. This is the big idea, the reason why I cannot draw fully upon my twelve plus years of schooling. The reason why my peers hated to write and read so much in school. It’s because we didn’t write about what was important to us. I remember hearing all the complaints and bitching about the newest assigned reading that we had to do. I oft over heard how much my peers would complain about having to start reading To Kill a Mocking Bird. I’d hear them ask what was the point of reading the Bean Trees? Why are we wasting time reading Of Mice and Men? What the hell is Shakespeare even saying? These are the same peers whose faces dropped like a horse whenever the topic of another essay came up. The peers who sat twiddling their thumbs and staring at blank pages because they hadn’t the foggiest idea how to start. I remember several English teachers who had methods that were similar to the Schaffer Method that we saw in class. The plain, simple organization that had

Topic Sentence

• ·        Main idea/ thesis

Body Paragraph 1

• ·          Topic sentence
• ·           Quote

Body Paragraph 2

• ·         Topic sentence
• ·         Quote

Body Paragraph 3

• ·         Topic sentence
• ·         Quote

Conclusion

• ·          Summarize what you just wrote in different words.

I found that I didn’t always have to stay with this method, and often I didn’t or I mixed it up a bit. But other students stuck to this because they didn’t know what to write about. They didn’t know how to structure and quite frankly I’d be surprised if they cared. And just like how teachers using the Schaffer method generally saw “rapid improvement in the writing of struggling students,” the students who followed the system were sure to pass the class. They struggled, but as ong as they followed the formula they would be fine.

            I don’t want my class to be like that. It turns people away from writing and reading and by the time they get to college, if they even get there at all, and take a GOOD English class that lets them rediscover that writing can be fun, it’s too late. I will never be as prolific a writer as I am a reader and it’s because I didn’t get into it as a child. I consider myself lucky that I picked up voracious reading as young as I did. Maybe it had something to do with being a loner, a shy kid, but I am glad I found a joy in reading. My niche was fantasy fiction writing. Stories of knights in armor battling monsters and demons. Of space battles that challenged how I thought about the universe. A lot of my morals, values, and outlooks that I hold dear come from the books that I continue to read.  And yet I could never pick up writing for myself. I wouldn’t consider myself a bad writer. In fact, sitting here in my chair pounding at the keyboard at night writing this essay I must say that I am proud of my skills. But I don’t write a lot for myself. I remember, on several occasions, sitting in my room and promising myself that every night I would write in my journal. I bought myself a nice bounded composition book and for a few nights I was diligent and wrote down a few pages. But something always happened and I skipped a night. Sometimes I had to stay up a little late and do that math homework that was due. Maybe my family had a party to go to and we didn’t get back until it was late and by then I just wanted to sleep. And so I’d skip a night. And another. And another. And another until it became clear that the journal I had promised myself that I would write sat on a shelf, never to be opened until I had to clean my room.

            When I began this essay I thought about all the times I didn’t write for myself. All the essays and paragraphs that I was assigned in school. All of the boring topics that I had to squeeze out onto a blank piece of paper. All of the headaches and hardships and late nights that writing has brought me over my education were the very first things that came to my mind when I decided to write. And while school still dominates most of my writing, I am starting to take it back now. The English classes that I have taken here at Chico have shown me that reading and writing consists of more than what I thought. It isn’t just something that we do because we are forced to in class. It’s a living, breathing medium that changes every time its read or a new thing is written. These classes have given me a breakthrough on what reading and writing truly encompass. It’s not just the classic and required books. It doesn’t have to be published and bound between the covers.  It can be texts that we send each other every day. The online memes that speak truth through comedy and sarcasm. The posters that regale us with how fun their events are. Real reading and writing is alive and it needs to be shared. I am going to have a classroom of my own one day. Maybe I will just be a science teacher in middle school, but even in science there is reading and writing. I need to be able to address the areas that my students are struggling with and inspire them to want to write and enjoy what they write. That is what I will try to accomplish when I get my classroom. I will probably fail the first time, but failure can be a good thing. After all, even Maier didn’t get it right the first time. And she might have been more terrified than me when she first began.

Olivares_RoughEssay_03/07/13

Estefan, this is who you write your L’s. Estefan, this is how you write a poem. Estefan, this is how you write a resume. Estefan, this is how a you write an annotated bibliography. Estefan, this is how we write in school. School is where I write. I am given an assignment and I do it. School tells me how to write and what to write about. If I had to make an estimate, about 90% of all the writing I have ever done was for school. There was little incentive for me to write. There still is. Its more fun to read, to escape to the world of another person. There is no effort on my part. I open up a book and a whole universe is there for me to explore. I didn’t have to make it up and I get to spend hours within the folds of the paper.
And glorious worlds there are. From Ellen Hopkins world of Crank and Impulse with their inverted language, constantly breaking writing conventions as a deeper more disturbed world is unveiled. Or the world of Brian Jacques world of Redwall with its brave and noble woodland creatures fighting to defend one another. And who can forget the food. It makes my mouth water even a taste of those wonderful morsels. Or the world of Michael Grant where children struggle to survive against increasingly powerful odds. A world where the rules are constantly changing and one mistake can change your life. Why should i write when their are thousands who will do it for me. What is the motivation when in my lifetime there is already enough literary works that would interest me that I couldn’t even finish them all.
So why do I write at all. School gives me the purpose of writing. School requires that I present my ideas out on paper, so I have to take the time and the mental power to produce pages of literature. Describe why light acts the way it does. Was Hamlet truly crazy and if so what is your proof? Summarize the plot of the Magic Treehouse books. Write what you think Genre Theory is. I think of myself as a good writer and given the time and motivation I have produced a multitude of words. I have filled a blank page with my own thoughts. But always at the behest of another. What I don’t do is write for myself.
One of the reasons for my lack of writing is because I can get my thoughts down fast enough. My pen can’t move as fast as my thoughts. Even the keyboard and computer with its advantages cannot compete with the speed that I can craft a story within my head. Writing, for me,  is like moving in slow motion. To craft the stories that I have requires me to slow down, to think about how people will view the piece. Does it make sense, do they know who is talking, Oh I had this really great idea but its so far ahead, know I have another story and its cooler. The ability to get my thoughts down takes considerably more time and energy because I am creating the universe. I am sculpting the pillars that will support a wondrous place for others to escape into. And creation is a long process. For someone like me with such a busy schedule, to leave aside time to build is a feat in itself.