What's up with Welsh

In consideration of what we learned from Prof. Toncelli and the readings, it is clear that traditional attitudes towards teaching emergent bilinguals has been inadequate to meet their individual learner needs. Instead of considering what they lack, or deficit-based, we need to consider them as assets to the classroom and "start from what students can do" (Fu 22). Requiring emergent bilinguals to communicate and write solely in English is absurd, for as Toncelli mentioned, humans only have one set of linguistic tools. Some have a more complex and stronger linguistic skillset than others, but by allowing emergent bilinguals to use their assets and knowledge of their native tongue, their English acquisition will be improved. Yet I also understand that this may be challenging for teachers. If a student's native tongue is Chinese, chances are the teacher will have no clue what their student is writing. While this might be uncomfortable as an educator, it is critical to consi...

Throughout my experiences in learning Italian, my training to become a Writing Center tutor, and my English courses both in high school and here at RIC, I've learned that English is one of the hardest languages to learn. It's a conglomeration of Anglo-Saxon, French, German, and other borrowed terms from other languages. Since it is so irregular, it is hard to pick up on, whereas other languages such as the Romance Languages of Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese are rather formulaic and much easier to learn. Yet native English speakers sadly take this for granted way too frequently. English, while not the most widely-spoken language in the world, is the language of commerce and capitalism, so it is the dominant language upheld by the dominant narrative. Because of this culmination of factors, those who are privileged enough to learn English as their native tongue and are SCWAAMP frequently look down upon those who cannot understand their language or are learnin...

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, "progress," as defined by technological advancement, has been exponentially growing. First came new means of power, and through that came new means of production, and through both, new technologies are created, s(t)imulated, and promoted. Even since the birth of the Internet, technology has grown exponentially, and will continue to do so. In the podcast "The Internet of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," danah boyd communicates that as an early internet kid who was first exposed to the internet through her brother's frequent use of the dial-up modem, the rapid growth that has resulted over the subsequent decades has been incredible. But should this necessarily be surprising, considering the data trends? Thereby, the birth of the Internet is a natural fallout in this renaissance of technological development. As technology in general has grown, means of interpersonal communication and information sharing became streamlined. I...

Personally, I believe writing comes from the heart. I believe that writing makes one vulnerable, as it forces one to reveal their thoughts and preserve them in paper or pixel. Often what follows with thoughts are emotion, for emotion informs and influences thought. Yet because of this, the best writing is writing informed by thought and emotion, for we as humans are emotional creatures and thus best understand each other through our thoughts and feelings. Therefore, how do we teach students to reign in the fire that are their emotions and create pieces that are meaningful to them? As Christensen suggests, and as I've come to believe, "teaching students to write with power and passion means first immersing them in curriculum that matters, getting them fired up about the content so that they care about their writing," because "when students write for the teacher instead of writing out of a compelling need to speak out, the writing is often tedious, not worth writing,...

Generally speaking, I don't really know how I feel about standards. I know that there is an obvious need to have benchmarks for measuring student learning and growth, but teaching is such an interpersonal act. These benchmarks must be evidence-based and data-driven to validate student growth and learning, but how can they account or adjust for the interpersonal emotion-based interaction that is teaching? As a "pre-service teacher" who is learning how to develop his own pedagogical philosophy, I find that the NCTE standards outline what teachers should do, such as teaching students to read a variety of texts across genres, apply their understandings to new texts and interactions, and use their knowledge for their own personal use in the future. I believe that these naturally accord with what an English teacher should do as a dedicated educator, and I find that it also accords with Bloom's Taxonomy through verb similarities; an important thing we must unpack as Wormel...

Since yesterday was my first attendance at the Rhode Island Writing Project, I was not sure what to expect. I knew only a few details--that teachers from across the state would be in attendance, that there would be workshops, and that lunch would be provided. Not only were these ignorant and vague expectations met, they were far exceeded. Upon my prompt arrival (a rare occurrence), I was met with a plethora of people, many of whom I knew. I saw many of my past professors, fellow peers, colleagues from OASIS, and in general, some of the brightest people I've met in my academic career. For me, this was an excellent opportunity because not only was I intellectually interacting with peers and professionals, we were all engaging in the collective task of bettering our practice of social-emotional pedagogy. When I read the program, I was immediately taken aback by the workshop offerings. I had assumed that we'd be doing workshops as a whole group (like in previous professional de...

The American education system is broken. Private testing companies make millions of dollars off "testing" students on their "competency" in given subjects. They promote ideals of what should be learned, which advocates a dominant narrative of education that is not inclusive to all students; rather it is exclusive to new ideas and new approaches to teaching. In the field of English Language Arts, the educators hired by testing companies communicate that the best writing is streamlined writing--the Five Paragraph Essay, the TEETH approach, this approach not unlike a mathematical formula-- is the best way to turn students into sufficient communicators in society. What utter horsesh*t. The fact of the matter is, there is no cookie-cutter method to deliver effective writing. Sure, all one's paragraphs should have a point, and one's essay should communicate a major argument or "thesis," but to box it up and simplify it with a formulaic approach like th...