Max+Perry's+Journal

1.
==I started playing games with my older brother on the Super Nintendo and PC when I was really young, Since then I’ve kind of shifted around the game world, I spent some time playing all different games (counter-strike at LAN parties, Age of Empires, and lots of flight simulators) but didn’t really get into gaming seriously until I started playing Madden competitively with my friends in middle school. From there on I had about a 8 year span where I gamed pretty regularly, spending most of my playing time on COD, GTA, and Madden. These days I rarely play for more than 15 minutes stretches a couple times a month. I’m very excited to be able to schedule in game time as a part of my busy schedule this term.==

2.
==In the real world I take on the identity of a husband, educator, coach, outdoorsman, and general goofball. Last year while living in Bush Alaska I picked up GTA V and really enjoyed playing it simply for the driving aspect of the game, where we lived was off the road system so we didn’t have a vehicle and it was fun to escape into that reality every now and then.==

3.
==I think that Gee’s literacy definition will impact my teaching in that I’ll try to get my students to use their different identities to access the material at hand, hopefully that will bring them to a deeper comprehension level if I can get them to appreciate it through their own lens.==

4.
==A semiotic domain that I’m experiencing currently is that of Special Education, in my current job as an IA in a SPED classroom and as an active member of the school’s staff I’ve found that I had to really play catch up when understanding the requirements and needs to be served in a Special Ed classroom. The aides I started working with had all been doing the job for a long times and they didn’t really give me a lot of training as to what I needed to do/know. But as the year has progressed I feel that I’ve really gotten a feel for the excessive amount of acronyms and educational jargon that I’m around everyday.==

5.
==I had a hard time getting any of the games to work over the past few days, but just now I sat down and played one from the list, Viking Quest. This game was really quite fun, it gave you plenty of options, there was an end result but I wasn’t quite sure what it would be so I became intrigued with the game from the start. Throughout the game there were different educational tid-bits thrown in, after playing it a couple times through I realized that it was designed to give the player a lot of good information about Viking society while still making it seem fun. I thoroughly enjoyed this educational game and am looking forward to playing more in the future.==

== Working with students in a Language Arts and Social Studies setting really gives me a great amount of opportunity to use virtual and projective identities. The first of which is having students place themselves in the role of someone, whether it be a poet when working on their writing or a Japanese factory worker at 8:15 on August 6th in 1945, once placed in these identities students can permit themselves to start thinking and seeing through a different lens than their own. It’s far too easy for young people to place themselves in at a mental cast, preventing new thought or growt. I was really intrigued by the idea of giving students permission to think in different ways or believe that they’re smart by giving them an alternate identity with which they are able to interact with their peers. ==

== I’ve encountered a lot of students over the past few years that have definitely possessed a damaged identity. 40 minutes before class this evening I was at the Track coaching shot-put. One of my throwers is a senior boy that had never done a sport before who came out for track to be social and perhaps to try and get into better shape. He’s been working hard but isn’t very physically talented and just not aggressive enough to get there. This evening he was getting frustrated and asked how many more throws he had to take, I told him 2 more and he groaned, basically admitting that he didn’t feel like he was really doing any good. Since I knew he was a little pissed off I walked out into the pit and told him to throw the shot at me. He got aggressive when he threw this time and nearly got my feet. I pulled him aside and basically told him that he can adopt that identity of being an aggressive guy whenever he comes to the track and it will help him get better. Adopting the mentality has been something I’ve been working hard at getting my athletes to understand and I think it translates directly to academics, just with academic confidence rather than rage. ==

== I think an example in Language Arts would be having students read a play, like Romeo and Juliet, But before having them read it I would show them a film or graphic novel version of the play. After sparking their interest I’d have them read the full play, working through the complexities as a group so they can garner a full understanding of the material. Finally I would take them to see a performance of the play. I believe that giving them multiple settings in which to absorb the play would allow for greater comprehension and also create a deeper understanding for performances. ==

== This morning I got to work and two freshmen Honors English students told me that they’d found the book of poetry I wrote in college. This book was experimental, both in nature and in its descriptions of drug and alcohol abuse. I panicked, scouring my mind for a way to get them to stop reading it. It was on their phones in front of me and I wanted to take their phone and smash it so I didn’t get fired for writing poetry. Then I remembered where I had posted it, a blog for a workshop. I got on my phone and found the blog and systematically deleted every bit of my writing that was online. This evening I was talking with my mentor teacher about it, he told me not to worry. He said it was art and I didn’t do anything wrong for writing “real shit”. I realized that it was actually kind of cool that these two students and read an entire book of poetry and liked it, I then realized how cool it was that the writing was my own. It made me want to write more with a creative lens, which is something I haven’t really thought about since this program started. ==

== I decided to play iCivics and have really enjoyed it so far. I’ve spent far too much time playing it actually. I can definitely see myself playing it with classes in the future to talk about how different countries play against each other when developing plans for interventions and diplomacy abroad. ==


 * 1) ==1. This past weekend I experienced some “Just in Time” information delivery as my cohort met for one of our few in-person classes. Our professor spoke about tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 level questioning. After she did that she handed out a piece of paper to each of us with a tier 1 question on it and then asked us to write out tier 2 and 3 questions that were based on a rubric she gave us in the lecture.==
 * 2) ==2. Since I just got home from coaching track I’m going to use that realm as a subject matter for this question. In practice we work on technique specific drills that help the athletes get better at every part of the throw. For instance, in the shot-put to get an athlete to bring their right leg in quickly underneath their body in the power position we use a drill called A/B/C. To start we have the athlete stand in an athletic position and then step back pretty far with their left leg so that their legs make an A shape. Next, the athlete is told to hit B or snap under, they then bring their right leg underneath their torso, keeping their feet perpendicular to their upper body. Lastly, they move into the “C” or “reverse C” position, which is the finishing position for the throw. By breaking down the technique even further we’re able to get the students in and out of good position repeatedly so that we can get ourselves prepared to throw in a competition, which would be the principle domain.==
 * 3) ==3. In Language Arts you can walk students through the process of “working a text” with a short story, poem, or article and then transfer that process to working a larger, more complex text.==
 * 4) ==4. I’ve spent most of the past two years working with students who are on the fringes of the schools I’m in, mainly kids who are at risk or are in special education. Working everyday with these students has really challenged my interpretation of what “normal” is for people in our society. Since I’ve spent a lot of my life living and participating in “mainstream” American culture I found it especially enlightening to go live in Bush Alaska with Yupik Eskimos. Living in their world and experiencing what their everyday life is caused a great shift in my cultural model of what it means to be an American and what it means to be a student in a rural community.==
 * 5) ==5. This week I played CSI: The experience and Sports Network 2. I thought that CSI was pretty good, the gameplay was about what I expected for a game about CSI. Sports Network 2 was pretty fun as well, I liked that it had you running all over the office doing different tasks, it was a great way to get you hooked on the game. I felt that I had to stop myself from playing because I was loosing track of time.==