Mar 18 2007

EDCI 463: Teaching Reading

Category: School — Lindsay @ 8:47 pm

This is the second entry in my mini-series (like I’m a TV show…) on my classes last semester. It’s as much for my benefit as yours (whoever you are out there, reading and not commenting.)

EDCI 463: Reading in Secondary Schools

I struggled to get through this class due to the volume of reading and the time slot. It was a late afternoon class, 3:30―4:20pm, so I was almost ready to fall asleep on the warmest afternoons. We started out with Weekly Reading Inventories due every class (Tuesdays and Thursdays). They were really just the professor’s way of making sure we’d done the reading. We only had to have three comments or questions, though, so a lot of the time, I stopped reading once I’d found my three comments. I had other things to do. Eventually, he realized that reading our WRI’s was more work than he wanted to do, so he threw out the assignment.

My classmates were from all different subject specialties, which made class interesting and awkward. There were about eight English majors, and our professor was an English teacher before he came back to grad school, so we dominated discussion most of the time. We had everything from math and physics to art and music majors. The non-English majors always had to push a little to come up with examples for their subjects. Who takes notes in music class?
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Mar 18 2007

EDCI 416: How to Be an English Teacher

Category: School — Lindsay @ 4:40 pm

Since I stopped blogging for basically a semester, I will now attempt to catch up on that four months of my life. I took five classes last semester. For the sake of organization, each course will get its own post. Fifteen credits (three per class) is an average full-time course load, and I’d had more than that in every semester except my first, so I thought I’d be fine. I was wrong. So very, very wrong.

EDCI 416: Curriculum and Instruction in Secondary English/Speech/Theatre

I call this “How to Be an English Teacher class”. It was co-taught by Peggy and Simone for lecture on Mondays at 8:30 (bleargh), and I had Peggy for lab on Wednesdays at 8:30 (more bleargh). We started out the semester with a ton of reading. Being me, I had to do it all… or at least as much as I could to submit the reflections due every week. It was worthwhile reading, though. The class was designed to be as practical as possible.
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Mar 18 2007

Catching Up with the Catholic Carnival

Category: Catholic Carnival — Lindsay @ 4:08 pm

The sheer madness of this semester kept me from reading Catholic Carnivals, but I saved all the notification emails so I could go back through them later.

Bryan at THEOdyssey (fun title!) writes about varying concepts of hell. His priest said he didn’t believe in hell, which, as Cathy comments, is heresy. I discussed hell with Hana once. I believe in the second version of hell: eternal separation from God. It’s hard to imagine what that’s like, since we have God now and have always had Him. With my life so God-filled now, though, that’s definitely a scary concept. I hope someone corrects that struggling man.

The Holy Father’s Midnight Mass homily for Christmas was lovely. My favorite line: “God made himself small so that we could understand him, welcome him, and love him.”

And now, a huge jump back in time: to August, when I was last keeping up with the Carnival. I disagree with Mark of Cowpi Journal‘s post about God’s using us. My favorite prayer for some time has been the Prayer of St. Francis. You know, the one that begins, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” I think being an instrument of God’s peace is an exalted role. We’re called to be God’s hands and feet in the world. That means doing His work. Free will is a wonderful gift, but the choice to do what He wills is the best—and only—gift we can give back to Him. Mark writes:

I can forget about praying for God to use me. God won’t. At best, God will grace me so that I can see the choices that need to be made to cooperate with Him.

But that’s exactly it! God gives us the grace to offer ourselves to Him to do His will. I agree more with Sarah of Just Another Day of Catholic Pondering. I am an unsharpened pencil, and God is the sharpener.

(Note: Mark has stopped blogging publicly since the beginning of this month. And I thought popping by Happy Catholic and seeing the beautiful redesign was bad!)

Jay of Deo Omnis Gloria muses on what it might take for people to believe in Jesus. He writes:

I’m always fascinated by the question of how many people would ever really believe in Christianity in general. And I think you can touch upon it by asking the question: what if Jesus appeared in the sky every night at 7:00 PM and explained why you should believe in Him? This would be the most blatant exposition of truth available. How many would believe?

Unfortunately, not all. People will fiercely cling to habit; in this case, unbelief. I drank a lot of Kool-Aid when I was little. (I still drink it when I’m at home.) Every so often, my mom would decide that I had been drinking too much Kool-Aid, so I should switch to water for a while. Water was punishment! Now, I love water. I drink a ton of it at school. You could call me a water convert. In the same way, even if people had Jesus speaking straight to them from the sky, they would find reasons not to believe if they didn’t want to. Great Commandment notwithstanding, I truly believe you have to come to faith on your own.

Christine of Domestic Vocation tells the sorrowful story of two body- and soul-racking pregnancies and how she handles it now. I can only imagine from her compelling account what she must go through every day.

Sarah also made a lovely post on the real purpose of the Mass. I’ve had the most wonderful experiences at Mass this semester, which I will elaborate upon in a later entry. Briefly, I’ll say that my appreciation for the Mass is only growing with time. As I’m more open to the miracle that occurs before us each week, He fills me with greater graces to appreciate it.

More to come.