Dead Poets Society Part 2

Good Teaching

            Mr. Keating advocates for self-thinking and doesn't care what Mr. Nolan says about that. Mr. Keating truly cares about what his students want to be and who they are. He invited Neil into his office and listened to his passion for acting and the fact that he couldn't tell his father because he disapproved. He listened and pushed Neil to tell his father that he wanted to act, despite his disapproval. Every student of Mr. Keating’s followed their dream and followed what they wanted to do even if it was considered “not the right thing.” My. Keating taught them how to strive for what they believed in. Mr. Keating cared passionately for his students. He wept when Neil killed himself because he had a special connection to him. Not just to him but with all of his students.

Bad Teaching

            The administrators of the school don’t let the students have room to breathe and room to say what they want. They have no freedoms and no room to speak. Also, the teachers use violence to get what they want out of their students. Mr. Nolan spanked Charlie because he wanted girls to come the school. Mr. Nolan doesn't support the boys thinking for themselves. Neil’s father doesn't listen to what he wants to do. 

Mike Rose's "I Just Wanna Be Average" Part 2 comparing w/Stand and Deliver

Just to start off, I thought both of these teachers were great. Obviously by watching the movie, Stand and Deliver, we got a more first hand experience of how Mr. Escalante was like & we didn't truly get that by reading Mike Rose's essay, " I Just Wanna Be Average" I still saw the exceptional teaching strategies of Mr. MacFarland. Throughout both of these stories you see strikingly similarities in the situation that they're put in & then the outcomes that come out of those situations. For example both Mr. Escalante & Mr. MacFarland  come in during time of struggle. Mike Rose was going through hard times when Mr. MacFarland came into his life. Coincidentally, Mr. Escalante was put into a class of struggling teens. Also, they both used hard work and lots of assignments to get where they wanted their students to go and what they wanted to them to learn. "We wrote three or four essays a month... We read a book every two to three weeks... He gave us a quiz on the reading every other day" explains Mike Rose. Mr. Escalante says from the beginning that they are going to have a quiz every day and a weekly quiz at the end of the week and then when he decides to teach them calculus he says, "You're going to work harder than you've ever worked before." Mr. MacFarland was able to make Mike Rose succeed in English, who never expected to even get into college. Mr. Escalante taught the kids calculus even though the other administrators doubted they would ever be able to. Not only did he teach them it he enabled them to pass the AP exam, even the most unlikely kids like Tito, who scored a 5, the highest possible score, on the exam.

Dead Poet Society Notes

Good Teaching

Mr. Keating joked around to try to relate to his students and brought them out to the hall in the beginning. He used humor so that his students understand. He also uses analogies from other classes so that they understand. Mr. Keating embedded the phrase “seize the day” into the minds of his students so they could ponder what that meant and figure it out in their own lives. Mr. Keating tells the students to rip the pages out that he thinks is crap, basically. Again he uses humor to connect to his students and to teach them in a way they want to be taught. Mr. Keating inspired them to do something they didn't think they would be interested in just by being their teacher and teaching them what he was supposed to teach. He constantly cracks his students up to keep them interested in poetry. He pushes them to look at literature in different ways. He also gives them an assignment to write their own poem. He uses soccer as a way to get them to like poetry. He encourages his students. Even if they don’t want to, making them believe in themselves too. For example he makes Todd stand up in class and YAWP to try and push the poem he wrote out of him.

Bad Teaching

            One of the other teachers at the school didn't care for the students and their interests like Mr. Keating and got irritated at them all the time, constantly telling them to shut up and sit down. Also the other teachers were stiff and didn't really believe in the students. 

Stand and Deliver notes (part two)

Mr. Escalante gets out of the hospital as quickly as possible in order to get back to teaching his students. A great example of what a good teacher he was, was when he came into the class after he came back from the hospital and all of his students rejoiced and got excited. I know from personal experience I would only do that to an exceptional teacher. From the point he got back and on he pushed his students to work hard to get good scores on their AP exams and to understand calculus. When it came time for his students to take the exam, they all did great. For some reason, this rose suspicion of cheating and threatened the kids integrity. Mr. Escalante wouldn't stand for this and accused the men accusing his students of discrimination because they're all Hispanic. He said that if they were Caucasian they would not have risen this suspicion and he was furious about this. The two men that thought the kids had all cheated demanded that they take the test again so it was obvious that they weren't cheaters. Mr. Escalante thought this was a ridiculous notion at first but then realized they had no choice and then told the kids that it was the only way to prove themselves. He dedicated himself to teaching them all that next day to, even through the night, which meant him inviting them into his house. Mr. Escalante was an exceptional teacher.

Final Draft (: First Term Paper

How I Learned to Gut my First Deer

            I was first introduced to hunting at a very young age. I remember our very first hunting trip as a family when I was seven and in the second grade.  We drove all the way to Pierce, Idaho. The first time I was fully engrossed in the hunting scene was the following year in Eastern Washington, near a little town called Lamont. By this time I was eight and in the third grade. My mother and four other sisters were in California for the funeral for my Great Grandfather so it was just my dad and I. My dad had pulled my grandparents trailer for us and a few other guys from our church to stay with us. There were other trailers and tents in the area that we were camping with other guys that we knew from church. This trip really opened my eyes to what hunting was really like because I experienced it all first hand. I felt the coldness of the early morning, I encountered tiredness of the same, and I saw blood. I was the only girl in the middle of a colossal man cave with no connection to the "outside world." 

            Hunting is a huge part of my life, and has been since my very first deer in 2007. That deer was involved in a highly unique experience that has affected my life forever. Most of the people that hunt normally kill their first deer at the ages of 15-17, but in my case I was ten. I had an extraordinary opportunity to go out and hunt with my family at a young age and was blessed further with a kill the second year I had carried a gun. Family tradition played a part in this special trip we take every October. My grandma's family has been hunting for as long as she can remember and when she married my grandpa her father and brothers taught him how to hunt, which he in turn taught my dad how to hunt. My dad then taught me how to hunt and we have been following the tradition of hunting ever since. We gather as a family every fall, take a week off of school and bond together making this experience one to remember for years to come even though there will be hundreds more. For this reason also, hunting is held near and dear to my heart as something that I love. Blood, guts, and skin are all things you will see when you are hunting. Quite appropriately, I'm very interested in science and want to go into medicine so when I see all these things and I can identify them it is fascinating. 

            Every chance a hunter gets to field dress an animal or "gut" begins with the pursuit. In the case of my first deer the pursuit was highly out of the regular. In fact, I wasn't truly out in the field at all, my family and I were on our way home with our trailer hitched up and everything packed away except for my gun, thankfully. We were barely on the road when my mom yelled "DEER!" Which made my dad slam on the brakes and everything in the car fly forward catching everyone off guard. Automatically I grabbed my gun and shoved bullets into the chamber as fast as I could. My dad had to roll down the window so I could prop my gun out side the door. It took awhile to adjust the window to where I could see out of my gun but when I could I was nervous. Hunters call this "buck fever". My dad, mom, sisters, grandparents, and friends all had to talk me into it and convince me I could do it and tell me that I was just psyching myself out and I was completely capable. It took awhile but I finally shot. Ears ringing, eyes squinting, sweat beading down my neck, the smell of gunpowder wafting through my nose, smile stretching from ear to ear, thinking, I had just shot my first deer. Oh no! I thought. It was still moving. Everyone was cheering, "Good job Taegen!” "Taegen, Wow!” "Awesome!” There was just one problem; did they know I didn't kill it right away? My dad got out of the car with his gun to finish it off... They must have known. My little sister, when seeing that the deer didn't die right away was sad and ask my dad to kill it saying, "I don't want it to 'suffercate'." On our way BACK to deer camp to gut and skin the deer I remember vividly, like it was only yesterday, hanging outside the window yelling, " I got one, I got one!" While everyone still at deer camp was standing there looking amazed. I had shot my first deer from the window of the passenger seat in our huge 12-passenger van on the way home from hunting. What a surreal moment. 

            Now killing a deer and gutting a deer are two entirely different things. When hunters are about to shoot their animal, they get nervous, "buck fever", but when hunters are about to gut their animal, they get an upset stomach. My case is, again, extra special indeed because instead of killing my deer right away, I exploded his insides. This deer was my first so I had no idea how to do what they call, field dress, this deer, therefore my father taught me. This is how I learned to gut my first deer! My dad told me to hold my knife so it pointed away from me at the very beginning, just i were to cut myself. He then directed me to cut open the deer's flesh in order to get to his innards. When he showed me how to do this he sliced the knife on the inside of the hide between the protective stomach tissue and the skin all the way up to the sternum. He then had me pull back the skin from the center to the outsides giving me more room to maneuver my knife. Next my dad guided me through cutting open then the abdomen. Unfortunately for me, the guts were all a soupy mess when I cut into the stomach therefore making it extremely challenging and messy to take out of the corpse. I had to stick my hands all the way inside the beast and cut and pull, cut and pull, cut and pull, until the guts were out. The guts of my deer were no ordinary guts. They were almost completely green with a heart, lungs, liver, and part of the stomach. I stayed there the whole time without gagging or throwing up one time while grown men, two, three, or even four times my age were gagging and walking away because they couldn't handle the sight or smell of my deer. It was a sense of pride I held, and still hold to this day that I withheld everything that went along with that deer. It was tough, yes, I'll admit that, but it withstood it and pushed through until the end and I pride myself on that. 

            Hunting was, is, and always will be apart of who I am. Whether it be gutting the deer, skinning it, shooting it, or having fun with family, hunting is always the best trip of the year and what I look forward to most. Learning to gut my first deer was vital to the rest of my life. It equipped me for further down the road when I have to gut my own deer without my father by my side, or when I have to teach my own children, or even use it to survive in the wilderness. It's a life lesson I'll take with me to my grave and I will cherish it forever. 

Rough Draft First Term paper

                                          How I Learned to Gut my First Deer

I was first introduced to hunting at a very young age. I remember our very first hunting trip as a family when I was seven and in the second grade.  We drove all the way to Pierce, Idaho. The first time I was fully engrossed in the hunting scene was the following year in Eastern Washington, near a little town called Lamont. By this time I was eight and in the third grade. My mother and four other sisters were in California for the funeral for my Great Grandfather so it was just my dad and I. My dad had pulled my grandparents trailer for us and a few other guys from our church to stay with us. There were other trailers and tents in the area that we were camping with other guys that we knew from church. This trip really opened my eyes to what hunting was really like because I experienced it all first hand. I felt the coldness of the early morning, I encountered tiredness of the same, and I saw blood. I was the only girl in the middle of a colossal man cave with no connection to the "outside world." 

Hunting is a huge part of my life, and has been since my very first deer in 2007. That deer was involved in a highly unique experience that has affected my life forever. Most of the people that hunt normally kill their first deer at the ages of 15-17, but in my case I was ten. I had an extraordinary opportunity to go out and hunt with my family at a young age and was blessed further with a kill the second year I had carried a gun. Family tradition played a part in this special trip we take every October. My grandma's family has been hunting for as long as she can remember and when she married my grandpa her father and brothers taught him how to hunt, which he in turn taught my dad how to hunt. My dad then taught me how to hunt and we have been following the tradition of hunting ever since. We gather as a family every fall, take a week off of school and bond together making this experience one to remember for years to come even though there will be hundreds more. For this reason also, hunting is held near and dear to my heart as something that I love. Blood, guts, and skin are all things you will see when you are hunting. Quite appropriately, I'm very interested in science and want to go into medicine so when I see all these things and I can identify them it is fascinating. 

Every chance a hunter gets to field dress an animal or "gut" begins with the pursuit. In the case of my first deer the pursuit was highly out of the regular. In fact, I wasn't truly out in the field at all, my family and I were on our way home with our trailer hitched up and everything packed away except for my gun, thankfully. We were barely on the road when my mom yelled "DEER!" Which made my dad slam on the brakes and everything in the car fly forward catching everyone off guard. Automatically I grabbed my gun and shoved bullets into the chamber as fast as I could. My dad had to roll down the window so I could prop my gun out side the door. It took awhile to adjust the window to where I could see out of my gun but when I could I was nervous. Hunters call this "buck fever". My dad, mom, sisters, grandparents, and friends all had to talk me into it and convince me I could do it and tell me that I was just psyching myself out and I was completely capable. It took awhile but I finally shot. Ears ringing, eyes squinting, sweat beading down my neck, the smell of gunpowder wafting through my nose, smile stretching from ear to ear, thinking, I had just shot my first deer. Oh no!, I thought. It was still moving. Everyone was cheering, "Good job Taegen!", "Taegen, Wow!", "Awesome!". There was just one problem, did they know I didn't kill it right away? My dad got out of the car with his gun to finish it off... They must have known. My little sister, when seeing that the deer didn't die right away was sad and ask my dad to kill it saying, "I don't want it to 'suffercate'." On our way BACK to deer camp to gut and skin the deer I remember vividly, like it was only yesterday, hanging outside the window yelling, " I got one, I got one!" While everyone still at deer camp was standing there looking amazed. I had shot my first deer from the window of the passenger seat in our huge 12-passenger van on the way HOME from hunting. What a surreal moment. 

Now killing a deer and gutting a deer are two entirely different things. When hunters are about to shoot their animal, they get nervous, "buck fever", but when hunters are about to gut their animal, they get an upset stomach. My case is, again, extra special indeed because instead of killing my deer right away, I exploded his insides. This deer was my first so I had no idea how to do what they call, field dress, this deer, therefore my father taught me. This is how I learned to gut my first deer! My dad told me to hold my knife so it pointed away from me at the very beginning, just i were to cut myself. He then directed me to cut open the deer's flesh in order to get to his innards. When he showed me how to do this he sliced the knife on the inside of the hide between the protective stomach tissue and the skin all the way up to the sternum. He then had me pull back the skin from the center to the outsides giving me more room to maneuver my knife. Next my dad guided me through cutting open then the abdomen. Unfortunately for me, the guts were all a soupy mess when I cut into the stomach therefore making it extremely challenging and messy to take out of the corpse. I had to stick my hands all the way inside the beast and cut and pull, cut and pull, cut and pull, until the guts were out. The guts of my deer were no ordinary guts. They were almost completely green with a heart, lungs, liver, and part of the stomach. I stayed there the whole time without gagging or throwing up one time while grown men, two, three, or even four times my age were gagging and walking away because they couldn't handle the sight or smell of my deer. It was a sense of pride I held, and still hold to this day that I withheld everything that went along with that deer. It was tough, yes, I'll admit that, but it withstood it and pushed through until the end and I pride myself on that. 

Hunting was, is, and always will be apart of who I am. Whether it be gutting the deer, skinning it, shooting it, or having fun with family, hunting is always the best trip of the year and what I look forward to most. Learning to gut my first deer was vital to the rest of my life. It equipped me for further down the road when I have to gut my own deer without my father by my side, or when I have to teach my own children, or even use it to survive in the wilderness. It's a life lesson I'll take with me to my grave and I will cherish it forever. 

Stand and Deliver

The first day Mr. Escalante uses Spanish to direct the students and places non-English speaking students at the front to give them a better chance of learning the material. He also uses lots of visual examples, like cutting up apples to show fractions and a sand metaphor to explain negative numbers. This made the material more accessible. He pushed students to learn whether they wanted to or not. A student was giving Mr. Escalante a rude gesture, but he was not bothered by this and kept pushing the students. Escalante expected a lot out of his students. He made the take test often, come on weekends and stay after class. For example, he wanted to teach them calculus, even though the other teachers did not think the students could handle it. Mr. Escalante stated that the students will rise to the level of expectations. He continuously advocated for student’s educations. One student’s father wanted to take her out of school so she could work at their family restaurant and Escalante went to the restaurant to convince the father to keep the student in school. All of these are examples of positive teaching methods. However, he could sometimes be inconsiderate by making somewhat inappropriate jokes and not listening to a student’s excuse for coming in late. These were intended to push the students and allow them to reach their potential, not simply to humiliate. Although Escalante was sometimes a little harsh, his methods were extremely effective.  

Good Teaching Vs. Bad Teaching - Stand and Deliver

Good Teaching

            Mr. Escalante uses Spanish to direct students & make them listen to them. He uses apples to teach them. He uses comedy and humor to teach them & relates to them. He doesn't let the bad kid make excuses for not coming prepared & teaches him anyways. He uses analogies to teach them math so they understand. He pushes them to do math even if they didn't want to. He works them hard to get results from them. He makes people like them so his students will listen & they will learn. Mr. Escalante fights for what his students want to do & not for what their parents want them to do & he fights for what is best for them. He took them out to a field trip. He believes in the students with a higher expectation than they do of themselves & than the other teachers do. He cares about his student’s personal lives, not just what happens inside the school. Mr. Escalante takes his student out for a drive to convince him not to take a job for his uncle’s company & stay in school. He also comforts Debra (?) when she is going through an emotional time with boyfriends & family troubles.

       

Bad Teaching

            Mr. Escalante doesn't assert himself sternly at first. The teacher lets the bell dismiss the children. One of the teachers in the meeting complained about not teaching the subject he wanted to teach because of cut backs instead of just doing what was right & keeping up high spirits for the school. The Principle & another lady doubt the students & don’t think it’s possible to teach calculus. Mr. Escalante didn't listen when the thug kid’s grandmother was having medical issues & was in the hospital as being the reason for being late & just blew him off instead by saying, “I think there was a counselor in here looking for you earlier. He said there were 3 openings for classes.” He basically was saying that he should just leave his class & not come back because he doesn't like he wants to be here.

The Process in Which to Gut a Deer

            The process by which you gut a deer is quite tedious. First, you have to kill the deer. Besides what you may think, you cannot extract the entrails of a deer if they’re still alive. The next step is very important. You have to find the deer. Contrary to popular belief finding a deer after it has been shot is not easy. It falls down because it is dead & there are tall strands off wheat or bushes strewn all around it making it almost impossible to find if you did not have a companion to see where it fell. When you get to where the deer is slain you must be careful there are no coyotes around to try to snatch up your fresh kill. Even if there are, you have a gun & you can have another fresh kill right there. Anyways, next you have to take off some layers because you’ll be getting dirty. Read very carefully to what I’m about to write, you must know if this deer is a boy or a girl because when cutting you’re going to want to get rid of any excess genitals as soon as possible. Even though the last sentence may have sounded ridiculous, boys & girls may be hard to tell apart. Teenage boys don’t have antlers yet meaning they can count for antler less tags. The incisions you will be making are crucial. If it is a female incisions to the right or to the left too much will cause their breast milk to pour out too much, which is extra fluid that in this case, we don’t want. For males the incision isn’t as restricted. For both cut all the way up to the rib cage & out to the edges. When you cut through the abdominals use the hook side of your knife to cut away the connective tissue & the start pulling out the stomach, intestines, kidneys, liver, heart, lungs, etc. When the cavity is empty hold the deer up by its head & dump out the excess blood. Make sure you tag your animal & take it back to deer camp.

My Favorite Education Narrative

            The Education Narrative that I liked the most was Feross Aboukhadijeh & Cate Huston’s. I think the reasons I liked these two the most were because they were the two who were the most engaging. I couldn’t help but being interested in both of these stories because they both knew what they were talking about & how to get their reader, me, interested. I’m not exactly the most computer savvy individual out there, & computers get me on the verge of cursing out but Feross danced around every fear I had about computers like they were nothing & engrossed me in every way with his dexterity in writing. I couldn’t help but think what it would be like to design a website or program computers. That’s exactly what I want to do when I write, I want to interest people in the things I’m interested in or thing that I learned in my education narrative. It was a very upbeat & fun essay that I enjoyed & didn’t make me fall asleep.

            Just as Feross kept me on my feet & almost excited to design a website, Cate Huston illuminated my desire to travel. I knew that I wanted to travel sometime in my future but I didn’t know if traveling alone would be scary or intimidating. I know I was supposed to be focusing on how her literary work should affect mine but I couldn’t help but connect to her interest also. I just loved everything about her essay & I hope that I can use the tone she has to keep people interested & the literary devices she used.

The difference between the Malcolm X, Mike Rose, Cate Huston, Ross Aboukhabijeh, & Joshua J. Romero's Essays

            These essays have a lot of similarities. For example, 3 of them are blogs, and 2 of them are articles. But in this case we’re not focusing on the similarities we’re trying to focus on the differences. Hey, I just named a difference right in the second sentence when naming the similarities! Not all of them are blog posts and not all of them are articles. Also, Malcolm X wrote his narrative much before the other four, so his experiences are different and he had to struggle with civil rights & African American stereotypes & prejudices. Mike Rose’s was about him wanting to be average. His stood out from all the rest, in my opinion, because it didn’t really tie into all the others. His story was a lot different from the other four. Feross Aboukhadijeh & Joshua J. Romero’s were very similar in the sense that they had to do with computers but also quite different. Romero’s had to do with wiping Google out of his life, almost completely, while Feross’ added in a big chunk of computers into his life. Romero taught himself to live a life without using Google, not because it’s necessarily bad but because he chose to, and Feross built his entire career around computer programing, something he taught himself to do when he was a mere eleven-year-old boy. Cate Huston’s essay was also similar to Feross’ & Romero’s, but also very different. Computers, the Internet, & cellphones are also a big part of her life being a mobile developer but her essay didn’t have much to do with computers life the others did. She told us how she used to hate traveling solo but because of her work she had to learn to love it & none of the above essays had anything to do with traveling.