I tried my best

 Well, I made it!

If you're a Sunday Scaries super-fan, you may notice that this and 4 other blog posts were all uploaded today! To be honest, not only did I get incredibly burnt out, I think I just put an unnecessary amount of pressure on myself to be the best when it came to writing these blogs that led to my downfall. I got this paralyzing fear that my blog wouldn't be very good when I posted it and because everyone else would see it, I felt that everyone would suddenly realize how horrible of a writer I am or how much of a fake English ed major I am, or something like that. Soooooo I hid. I pulled myself in and in and in until I just got so overwhelmed and didn't post anything else until today. And that made me very very anxious in and of itself, and so it all just collapsed. 

...and here I am! I made it! I felt so much less pressure posting these blogs almost knowing no one would see them and they'd just be submitted for a grade and that's all, and then I'd be done with it. This semester has been difficult, to say the least, but we're almost there! So, if I had to pick, here are my nominees for my cool awesome blog:

1: Professionalism
I don't really think of myself as a very professional person, I keep it easy breezy and push against the professional mindset, but my book talk, blog 6, has to be my most professional one. I wasn't as silly goofy as I usually am in these posts, and I kept it more in line with what I was talking about without straying from the path as much. The assignment itself was designed to be a bit more professional as we were talking about more civil engagement ideas, but I felt more like I was actually creating an assignment as opposed to freely writing in a blog post, and it worked out for that post! Of course, I let some of that silly goofy stuff slip in because that's just who I am.

2: Multimodal Design
...obviously I'm gonna pick my multimodal design project, right? Yes! Blog 7 was really fun! I felt really like I was playing around in photoshop and just messing with settings and making it feel more real, and I had fun making it! All the other blog posts had other aspects of multimodal design, like photos and other articles being uploaded, but this one was my most multimodal post! I really felt some of my experience with composing other than writing was really able to come out here, and I was happy it did, because it exercised my long dormant photoshop muscles!

3: Creativity
I think the blog post I'm most proud of is blog post 3! I felt super proud of what I was writing and showed my family some of the lines because I really felt like I did a good job. Maybe I didn't actually, but I was really satisfied with my own job. With my little intro paragraph, "In the age of AI we as a society have been thrust into, it's hard to avoid it. On my drive to and from work I see billboards about AI, I get ads everywhere about Google Gemini, and most disappointing of all My AI Girlfriend ads are all over the place and that's how I found out my AI girlfriend was cheating on me." I felt so funny. I really tried, and I succeeded myself and I succeeded in the creativity I was going for.

4: Civic Engagement
...Blog post 5? I think? If repeats are allowed I would probably go with blog post 6, but the next best thing would be 5. I really think empathy and compassion are civic engagements, and people don't really think of them as such. I talked a lot about how we need to build better relationships and approach them with compassion, because these make the world go round. I really try to preach compassion and empathy as much as I can, and I think that's what has lead me to be a teacher, so if you were to take anything away from my blog, it would be please be kind and compassionate.

People's Choice (late...):
I always had Emily's blog Em's Nook in mind as my choice! She always put in a lot of effort and care into her posts that I want to be recognized as much as possible! She really cared about her quality and it was always fun reading her posts, I'd absolutely have to go with hers! A+++

Thank you for reading my silly little posts and going on this emotional adventure with me. I'm relieved to be done, but sad it's over. I have complex feelings about my Sunday Scaries blog, but I had fun, thanks for joining. See ya, hugs and kisses, love ya!!

it's okay, keep watching :)

 

I felt like the process of making this is very exemplary of what I was going for, it turned into a more and more distorted image the more I had a solid grasp on what I was going for. I started with the warning signs in the back, then wanted to add the little notification bells so there's what is actually being warned about. Then came the idea of Carl Jung's persona where I overlayed that with a bit of an opacity to signify the idea that you have this different online persona that's created every time you engage with social media. That was a big theme in Tweet Cute but also something I really wanted to touch on, because when you go on social media, you're putting on this performative version of yourself that's not the best version of yourself. It changed what I was thinking about that book a bit, because it became this accidental representation of that stupid concept. Everything became distorted as time went on, and that was the most satisfying part, watching it all come together.

All in all, I think this was a fun playtime, I really just stretched some photoshop muscles and it felt refreshing! I think that's definitely something that can be used in my future teaching, just a creative breather that doesn't hold a whole lot of stakes, just something to let happen naturally. Students have total freedom with this kind of thing, it's all transformative, becoming something entirely new and their own, so I'd like them to run wild with all the possibilities that can come from that.

Get hyped, book talk!!!!!!!!

 

BOOK. TALK.

I think, as I touched on briefly in the book talk, it's hard to find a way to incorporate the idea of social media over-usage into my teaching other than the way the books did. They kinda had it as a background side effect, something that drove the plot forward, but wasn't really a main theme of the book. Adolescence is hard with all rampant emotions, and throwing social media into the mix to give students these false pretenses of how the world works and how they should look at themselves is really disheartening. What I can really do for this is just give warnings and talk about it with them as a thing I worry about, but not craft a whole lesson around. Besides, I'm not that smart anyway, I'd have to figure out a solution and boy oh boy is that difficult. 

I think the best way I can take this a step further and turn it into a sort of collage zine, like a sort of big warning sign, I think? Idk, tune in next time!

I'm sorry, I wish I'd been there

OKAY YES that title is a little teeny-tiny bit dramatic, but it's really just a dramatic way of saying what I think.

When helping young writers this semester, I felt incredibly bad that I couldn't be there to support them more in what they were making, and that I don't get enough time to get to know them. As everyone is in school, they're really trying, and whether that shows through the lack of an assignment turned in at all or through a piece of work that is genuinely impressive, students are really trying. I felt incredibly limited in trying to help, but what I did see I was happy to help with, if only a little bit. And, to be honest, I didn't want to tear into the works of a child that I only knew liked Roblox. 

I think what writers need most is someone who believes in them a lot. Going beyond that, I think writers, and students in general, need a teacher who they have a good relationship with. It's not the most important thing, but it's something a value a lot. While working my job at the UWM Children's Learning Center, I've found the most important thing I've done is connect and bond with the kids, because they are so much more likely to listen to me when I'm their trusted caregiver. They know if they listen that I'll have fun with them and make them laugh, but I won't tolerate when they misbehave. I'm putting this into the simplest terms possible, because I think it's something you can only pick up on the job, you can't just really have an idea of how to do that going in. It's hard, it's very difficult, but it's the most rewarding thing in the world when I walk in and they're all yelling my name over each other. THAT is what I'm looking for in teaching, and THAT is what I think was the biggest missing piece from my time working as a writing coach this semester. 

I think it's hard to even go into all the things that writers need from teachers and from coaches, because it's very individual and only can be done by getting to know that student. The best feedback can be given when what needs to be worked on the most consistently is learned. Say a kid has really really great ideas and a really solid grasps on concepts, but grammar mistakes are what they get tripped up on. Am I going to consistently focus on their usage of metaphors? No, I'm going to tell them how good of a job they did on those aspects, but I'm going to try and figure out where the disconnect with the understanding of grammar comes from. Even beyond that, sometimes kids will just come into the class and not have an interest in writing whatosever, and that's perfectly fine, because they may go to their next period class and be incredibly interested in math because that's their favorite subject. When it comes to writing, it's important to point out where they went right but also help where they went wrong. It's hard to maintain that balance, but I think a really good way to do so is just through a lens of empathy and compassion. In maintaining that balance, Capt. Rebecca Segal has a really good point about maintaining that compassion, saying, "No editing should be a slaughterfest. Be empathetic; editing is an agreement of trust and vulnerability, and your job is to help the author. If your author leaves disillusioned with the process, you have lost them and you have failed as an editor," (Segal, p. 4). The relationship between the writer and the editor (whether that be peer, coach, or teacher) is so easily severed by just being a little too harsh a critic, so please just exercise that caution when it comes to editing, no matter who you are to that person. Also, please stop using a compliment sandwich...

I could go on and on and on about how difficult it is to simply be a writing coach for me, because I want to find out and learn everything about my students so I can best help them instead of checking in every once in a while, so overall I think this writing coach aspect just did not work for me, unfortunately. I felt very disconnected and felt like it was hard to give good feedback, because I know how to give good feedback, I just wanted to give them good feedback. I sound a lot less jaded and lot more tired in this post because frankly, I am, and I think that's also a good point to bring up. I am not in the best position to help guide these writers because I can't even guide my own writing, this post is a lot more academic than usual because frankly, it's hard to summarize my thoughts into all this. I think it's a learn on the job thing, and I, frankly, can't wait to learn.

Much To Do About Everything

Which would you pick, the ability to do everything, or the ability to do a few things, or maybe one thing?

I think the clear answer is everything! Life's too short, I'd love to be able to learn every language, travel the world, experience everything! I can't decide what I want to do, there's too much going on and too little time. So that's why little seven-year-old Jack decided that he couldn't decide what superpower he'd give his brand new superhero for his comic book, Ultra Boy.

The premise followed a boy named Jake (phew, that was close Jack, everyone almost guessed that that's supposed to be you) who got into some freak accident that gave him every superpower. The sequel comic introduced his female counterpart, Ultra Girl. Her name was Julia (coincidentally and not at all related, I had a crush on my neighbor with the same name) and she had every superpower as well. They teamed up and fought Dr. Evil (any correlation to Austin Powers was purely coincidental and due to the limited mind of a seven-year-old boy), a fight that they struggled with, but still came out on top. This comic was a limited run, only having two issues in the fall of 2010, so obviously it's a collectors item now.

To get a little bit personal, my grandma passed away that following January. She stayed with us sometimes due to her poor health, but I remember running downstairs after stapling together my comic book to excitedly show her first. She finished reading and said, "Where's the sequel?" I quickly got to work on the second one, and after learning about She-Hulk and Spider-Woman from my big book of Marvel characters I often scoured through, I decided Ultra Boy needed a counterpart. I think the next week I finished it, and immediately showed her again. I unfortunately don't remember what she said specifically, but I do remember her being proud of me, and always encouraging me to be creative. This is all to say when I came up with an idea as an adult for a passion project of a comic book series following superheroes, of course I couldn't decide what superpower I wanted to give the main character.

I've shied away from "traditional" writing formats in my personal writing, but the main one I come back to is comic books. I love the medium, it's so many things I love about storytelling rolled into one. I love the visual aspects, the dialogue, narration, writing style, everything. When I was in early grade school, I thought it was stupid I couldn't read comic books for Accelerated Reader or that it would even count towards reading goals. There was always this elitism towards the classics, and I despised that. I think when I'm a teacher, if a kid wants to read graphic novels or comics for a class, I'll find a way to make that work. Say you're just like me, I think you would have taken to English way earlier if you were able to explore more multimodal genres and studies. I want to create an assignment where, if they wanted, instead of writing an essay they could write a short film, or create a comic book, because I know that's what would have gotten my brain really really thinking. 

In one of our course readings, there's this one article by Jessi Thomsen that perfectly exemplifies this, where there was this summer course with ninth and tenth graders who all were given a collage assignment, and in the article there's a situation that ends up as follows: "She wanted to create a sense of guilt, frustration, and confusion because, as she explained, these feelings still surface in response to a memory of powerlessness while witnessing an act of violence. Leah’s emotions came through the images of her composition, conscientiously and thoughtfully," (Thomsen, p. 5). The biggest thing I think to take away is you could say the same thing if they were making writing. And, in a way, they were making writing, they were organizing their thoughts and emotions onto a page to represent their feelings. I think the current definition of writing in schooling is incredibly limiting, we took away the literal ruler smacking the back of kids hands but we kept the figurative one. There's this kind of elitism when it comes to English studies that really limits what can be taught and said that's really detrimental to the education of writing and media studies as a whole, and while yeah, we study the "old texts" because they've been around long enough for a reason, don't you think it's time to mix things up a bit? Clearly typical English studies aren't working... 

Students can explore so much more when it's not just writing an essay about The Odyssey, because they have so much more creative freedom to do whatever they want. They can turn their ideas about that text into some kind of exploration of social justice and not just write a simple interpretation, poetry is a powerful medium to do so as well. The bottom line is that students need to be able to fully explore their work, how it connects to the world, and what works best for them, because would it be so bad if they liked what they created?

AI don't like the way this is going

Aren't I clever for that title?

In the age of AI we as a society have been thrust into, it's hard to avoid it. On my drive to and from work I see billboards about AI, I get ads everywhere about Google Gemini, and most disappointing of all My AI Girlfriend ads are all over the place and that's how I found out my AI girlfriend was cheating on me. 

AI integration is everywhere, and unfortunately, the train has left the station and it doesn't really feel bad for you that you've been left behind. It wasn't slow, it was all at once, and now we're here and the only thing we can do about it is reluctantly adapt to these changes. Trust me, I don't like it either, but I have to agree with the sentiment that teaching AI is like teaching Sex-ed, you can't just close your eyes and flail your arms about trying to get it to go away. Zach Teitel, the author of "Teaching AI: It's Just Sex-ed" puts it best saying, "The better approach - the responsible approach - is education grounded in critical literacy and humanistic values. Not to moralize. Not to control. But to prepare," (Teitel, 2025). If you tell teens in Sex-ed to never have sex until marriage or something similar and then call it a day, you're going to end up with STD's and unwanted pregnancies that are all immensely hard to deal with. Turning a blind eye to AI and just banning it entirely in a classroom is somewhat ignorant, you have to look forwards, not shelter in place. 

But enough of the analogies, it's time to ask ourselves where AI can be used then, if we were to integrate it into learning? Even now, I still don't think it's very much at all. AI gets things incorrect A LOT, especially with summaries and pulling quotes from articles, so the best way to teach it is like teaching how to research on JSTOR. Here's how you prompt it for the best results if you are going to use it, and here's how to identify if a response is totally stupid and insane. You can use it to perhaps check the grammar on your paper in a basic sense, or maybe in a research paper to quickly find articles. I'll use a real example, I used AI to help with a paper once where I needed to find 10 examples of coming-of-age books that related to my point. I could spend a while looking into this, which isn't even the main point of my paper, or I could ask AI to find 10 examples, then I fact check it and see if it actually gave me a correct answer, and move on with writing the content of the paper that matters so much more. I spent more time on learning how to write the paper, rather than spending that time on trying to find examples I needed to use to check a box. There's this article that talks about how you can integrate AI into the classroom, and I disagree with it in generating actual classroom content, but the idea of generating essays to show them what not to do actually seems like a pretty good idea. Then there's Ruth Li's article "Cyborg Composing with AI" about hybrid writing with AI that demonstrates that with an AI generated poem and I just do not agree. AI writing and human writing are incompatible. You cannot merge the two, they're two different blood types, AI does not understand why there are line breaks in poems. I don't really think that will work, writing is an art, and art is inherently human. You can use AI to guide the writing process, but you cannot supplement it. You look to a dictionary for words you're trying to find to sound more eloquent and smart in your writing, but you don't look for a whole paragraph. AI is a gentle nudge in the right direction, not holding your hand to show you how to cross the street.

If you are going to use AI, take the path where you still learn from the process. 

Learning isn't about what you've made, it's not the 4, it's the 2 + 2. It's how you figured it out, it's the process of doing. It's the, "and why did you think 4 was the answer?" Learning is living, your brain is processing new information every day and it's constantly creating new pathways of information so you can recall how you yourself optimized it. It's lesson 5, the shortest route is the detour. Learning can only be done by the person, it cannot be done for you by AI. It can't write for you because you didn't do any work. And sure, if you want to get into semantics and technicality, then yes, technicallyyyyyyyyy you did the work to prompt the AI to write the paper, but let me ask you this, did you do any real work pressing "Big Mac" at the big ol' self-ordering screens at McDonald's? No, you did not prepare an unforgettable luncheon, you're not delightfully devilish, just because you purchased fast food you did not pass it off as your own cooking. 

And look, I get it, some students that walk into your classroom DO NOT CARE about English or writing or reading comprehension, and that's totally fine. I didn't care for high school math or science, but I really cared about English, and that's why I'm here. They're going to want to take the shortest possible route because they don't care, and to an extent, I can understand that. I was in the same position not too long ago and I can't say with 100% confidence that I would not have used AI so I could spend more time on my hobbies and less time on homework. People would pass around ways to effectively do that in math class, I remember something like "MathScan" being the hit new thing, you'd take a picture of your math homework and it would just do it all for you. I just use all this as motivation to be a better teacher so I can prove to my students that my work I'm giving them is worth their time, it's worth their effort. I see AI as a challenge, a challenge to be better, and I invite everyone to not reject the motions already set in place, but to instead learn how to surf, because after all, surfers are cool as hell.

Life's like a movie, write your own ending

  

You know how in school they teach you how to write a certain way with certain rules to follow and with a formal structure with citations done exactly the right way? When I was young, I hated that so much that I'd go as far to say English was my least favorite subject. I hated the amount of work I had to do when all I wanted to do was start a sentence with the word "But" and I was told that was improper grammar. So much of my current writing style exists in spite of that. 

A lot of teachers and proofreaders for my writing have described it as "stream of consciousness" and they'd be right. Simple as. But I like that, it feels like when people read my writing that we're actually having a conversation. Contractions, kindas, and phrases like "I s'pose" fill my page. When I write to people, I write to appeal to them like I'm their little league baseball coach, getting down on one knee after a crushing loss, putting my hand on their shoulder and saying, "Hey Champ." Getting more down to Earth makes me feel like I can get on you as the reader's level way easier. Maybe that's because of my love for comics and manga, it's much more down to Earth, Spider-Man thwips around New York effectively talking to the reader when he says, "I gotta find Electro before he causes any more damage to the city! But first, I should check in with MJ." 

I do this because I want my future students to know they can write about whatever they want, they have full creative freedom when it comes to writing, because writing is the most freeing art form. Everyone writes every single day, the thoughts in your head are your own writing, the structure of the sentence you're saying is your own writing, it's all up to you, you can write about anything you want and there will always be an audience for it. And I, as the teacher, will be your number one fan and happy to be seated in your audience.