Saturday, May 29, 2010

NJCH Internship

Doesn't it feel good when you know that all of the hard work you're putting into something is going to pay off and turn into a spectacular final product?

That's kind of what it feels like to have my internship with the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. Right now I'm planning their summer Teacher Institute, which is basically five 1-week residential seminars where teachers can earn 45 professional development hours and learn new content to help them in the classroom. You can go to www.njch.org/teacher_seminars.html for more information about the program. It seems really worthwhile, and I definitely want to attend a seminar one day now that I've seen all the planning that goes into it.

Thus far, I have contacted publishing companies to order bulk quantities of all the free textbooks and novels that the teachers will receive. Each teacher receives about $80 worth of free materials, which is just amazing, since it only costs each teacher $100 to attend the seminar. I think that contacting the publishing companies has been my favorite activity so far. Right now I'm in the process of assembling other shorter reading packets, as well as planning the individual field trips for each seminar. I'm looking forward to my next project when I go back to work after Memorial Day.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Hyphen-Dash--Exclamation Point!

This semester I have experimented with punctuation in my writing. I never thought that at age 20, after more than 15 years of writing, I would be able to change my writing so significantly with such simple moves--punctuation marks! It's amazing how much power can be added to a sentence simply by rearranging the words--or even by adding a dash to off-set a phrase. Now, that's some powerful stuff!

All joking aside, I even incorporated unique punctuation style into my final paper for my LIT 499 class (see previous entry). Hopefully, by experimenting with punctuation--and by trying new punctuating techniques--my writing will sound more sophiscated. Imagine that! More sophiscated writing just by adding a few marks.

After this semester I will be sure to continue to include interesting punctuation into my writing--and you can bet that next semester while I'm student teaching, I will teach minilessons on using punctuation with my middle school students. Who knows what the future will have in store for punctuation in my life???