#blog two

Let’s talk about REM sleep. Specifically, dreaming. I’m still not over this sleep thing. I haven’t slept because of it.

AGORAPHOBIA!!! A lot of people have been asking me to expand on my agoraphobia, how it affects me, what it is, how my job interview went with my agoraphobia. So I will answer all these pressing questions in this blog called AGORAPHOBIA!!!

It felt strange packing the largest suitcase that I owned to travel from East New York, Brooklyn across the Brooklyn Bridge to the Upper West Side, Manhattan to meet the students and faculty who I’d be sharing space with for the next three months. It was the launch of my human rights study abroad program and we were meeting at Jazz on the Park Hostel, the hostel that would be my home for two weeks and it was situated right across the street from Central Park. Both my mother and my brother, Omari came to drop me off and, of course, to survey the students and faculty who I’d be spending so much of my time with. Everyone seemed nice and a bit reserved but I attribute that to it being the first day. We totaled 27 students in all, one travelling Professor and one Trustee Fellow. The group is majority women, with only five male students. The group is majority White women with a minority of women of color. I am the only Black student on the program. I shared a room with four other girls, all from different parts of the United States and varying colleges with different personal experiences and positionalities. I felt excited, but also nervous—happy and disappointed—annoyed and unfamiliar. I was home, in New York City, but I was in a space that wasn’t my home, one with no Black people, no fierce activists, no childhood friends, no college friends, no artists, and no community that I had spent so much time, and light, and love building up this summer. Yet, I knew that the opportunity to travel to three countries that I had never been to was one that I could not give up. It would truly be an experience of a lifetime, and for that I felt gratefulness eating away at all of my other emotions.

Last Wednesday, October 7th, 2015, I attended a reading by Claudia Rankine. The pieces she read were originally published in her book, “Citizen,” a book I now feel the need to desperately get my hands on. On the cover of “Citizen,” against a stark white background, was a picture of a black hood, a simple image that alludes to the death of Trayvon Martin; some say a picture is worth a thousand words and in this case there is no truer phrase. 

I added a song to this post because I have decided to share a ‘song of the week’ in my blog posts. Take a listen while you read!

After thinking about what we went through in class with characteristics of writing and what our blogs can be about, I decided to review games I play and discuss new ones I discover. Video games are a huge part of my life and I have played just about every console, but I mainly play PC now. PC was a huge part of my life when I was little, alongside Nintendo 64. I do have to say that my favorite console, however, was GameCube.

Have you ever heard of ARK: Survival Evolved? It’s all right if you haven’t, because not many people have. It is still in Alpha, meaning it is released for people to test out, but it is not finished. Now, whenever I mention how ARK is a “survival” game, people automatically say, “Oh yeah! Like ‘The Last of Us,” the survival horror game, right?” No, not exactly... This isn’t a game where you have an objective and try not to die while getting there while following a story. A TRUE survival game is where you have to pay close attention to your health, thirst, and hunger meters while going against the elements.

ARK places you on an island infested with DINOSAURS! There are herbivores, which will not attack you on sight, and the big bad carnivores, which will eat you if you get too close. You can tame them, too! Each dinosaur is unique. Some herbivores are better at getting berries while others can harvest wood. Some carnivores are slow yet powerful, and some carnivores are extremely quick on their feet, but can’t take a hit well. I believe the scariest part of the game is the other people. If you are a very low level, most people will kill you on sight. There are some that will help you sometimes, though. Pretty much as soon as you join a server, you need to level up and build a shelter as fast as possible. Here is a video of me playing the game so you can get a better idea of what I’m talking about even though I’m playing solo.

The "Understanding By Design" model is kind of a no-brainer when you think about how students should learn, but as a student who has little to no practice in creating lesson plans from scratch, it's a big challenge. Of course, design matters to the goals of the class. The "traditional" way gets all the standards met on the surface, but nothing is said about how or why the lessons matter. The biggest thing I took away from the UBD book was that you want to be specific when telling students what they are expected to do/know in the class, but you need to present the information in a way that shows it's importance to matters outside of the classroom. The "Big Picture" questions are really lofty to think about, but that's the point. They aren't supposed to be "answered with brief finality". Instead, they are meant to make students really think about how the question pertains to their lives as well as the lessons. It's kind of hard to think of how a big question can be made into a unit or multiple units. And even harder to find goals that can be worked with my focused area.

I'm thinking of doing a unit on "The New Classics", and it's easy to think of some stories that can be read/discussed, and types of things that students are expected to learn from them. I'm having trouble coming up with the "so what" aspect. I've thought of a few sort of ideas that need to be fleshed out a lot more.

- how do the "tropes" being used in a story effect societal views of gender/minorities/etc. today, compared to when it was originally published, and what can we learn from the "morals/lessons" presented? - what is the influence/relevance of classic stories in present day? (ie: Romeo and Juliet -> Warm Bodies, a zombie-fied futuristic movie about the romance between "R" and Julie.) - how does the author/director's choices in presentations affect our perception of the story and what we think is important? (Or how does a different format or version of the story compare to it's original and how does that change what you take away from it?)

I'm trying to steer this towards an idea of "I want my students to understand how classic literature, with or without the modernizations, have a impact on how parts of society are viewed, how concepts are still relevant, and how we can see these ideas from literature being evoked on today.

I'm not sure where to go with this. I've got concepts but I'd love any feedback on how to make this work or make it more specific. 

Blog: Two dads and second parent adoption

By Brandon Cline-Taskey

We both love both of our children and would do anything for either of them; regardless of what Virginia has to say about it. Sadly, even though we are both parents to our two children, what Virginiahas to say about it is that I only have a son and my partner only has a daughter. We are a loving family with two dads and two kids, but our legal protections are less than…