"Fashion fades, style is eternal." -YSL

In class we discussed different representations of school and learning in popular culture.  We talked about different movies,TV shows, songs, comics, games, etc. and I thought that fashion could also be a good representation as well.  In school, all students have different learning styles.  They can learn really well using one technique and may struggle using another technique.  Like learning, people all have their own clothing style.  I was thinking about broad categories that I could group the learning style into.  I came up with traditional and nontraditional learning styles.  The fashions i thought of to go along with those styles would be preppy and hipster. 

 The traditional learning style would be compared to a preppy style.  A person who is preppy has a very traditional/classic look and don't really step outside of the box and experiment with different styles.  A traditional learner describes a student suited to learn with in the boundaries of a physical classroom using a predefined curriculum.   The classic and traditional look is always in style and is never changing.  It's very safe and you can never go wrong with that look.  Like the traditional clothing style, traditional learning is very safe and you can never go wrong with it.

The other learning style that can be represented by fashion is a nontraditional learning style.  The "hipster" would be the one to portray this learning style.  A hipster is a person who is aware of and interested in a new and unconventional patterns.  In school, there are always new technologies that teachers use to help students learn.  There are also always new theories that are coming out everyday.  Like the nontraditional learning styles, hipsters are always trying out the new fads that are coming out.  They like to experiment with these ideas and styles and they are trying to find their identity in a sense.  What style is cool and "in" one day maybe be totally gone the next day and they just keep trying out the new styles.  

Don't let anybody dull your sparkle!

 I thought that this quote was not only appropriate for your life, but also for writing.  You need to be an individual and you shouldn't care what other people think about you or let people put you down (dull your sparkle).  I always hated when we had to peer edit papers because I thought that people are going to judge what I wrote or think that i'm dumb for having bad grammar.  But I had to stop thinking like that.  I shouldn't care what other people think about my writing because they are my ideas and it shouldn't matter what others think.  Last semester, Lacy wanted me to play around and be more creative with my writing and I was really hesitant at first because I didn't want to sound stupid and I didn't think that I was very creative.  As the semester went on I stepped more and more out of the box and I really began to enjoy writing more.  I didn't feel dumb and I knew that nobody was going to dull my sparkle because I knew that what I was writing was good enough.  I think that everybody needs to start thinking in that way because they will have much more effective writing.  

Customized Daybook

“In order to be irreplaceacle, one must always 

be different.” - Coco Chanel

                        

                          

One of our first homework assignments was to bring items to decorate our daybooks.  I had a daybook last semester but it was a plain black and white one (boring).  When I found out that we were going to be customizing our daybooks, I know it's dorky, but I got giddy!  I love decorating things and I will jump at any opportunity that allows me to be creative.  I spent way too long on printing out pictures and trying to lay out the pictures so that my daybook looked exactly how i wanted it to.  When I was decorating my daybook I was most excited because it was going to be all mine and nobody else's was going to look like mine.  My daybook now has all of my favorite things on it and it is individualized.  Now that I have made my daybook the way that I want it and my very own I feel more comfortable with letting more words flow more freely.  

On the first day of class Lacy gave each of us a string and some instructions to learn how to do string games!  I was really confused at first to why we were playing with string in a college english class, but as class progressed we made connections with the string to school and life in general. 

The first day of class is normally extremely awkward because you don't really know anybody and you don't want to put yourself out there and talk to people that you don't know.  Lacy's class is not like that at all.  She always has an intro to class that is fun and makes you feel comfortable and is relevant to what we are doing that day.  I am normally very quiet if I don't know you but this class allows me to be myself and step out of my comfort zone while in a school setting.  When I walked in on the first day of this English 1102 class and picked up a string and began playing string games I knew I was going to be comfortable.  

I was sitting in the back of the room with two of my friends and we were struggling really hard to make our cup and saucer and we were getting a kick out of ourselves.  Lacy wanted us to read an article and make connections between the article and the string games.  My group made a lot of connections, one in particular was how you have to be willing to take risks with your string in order to make the final product that you want.  In life, you need to take risks, like talking to the kids in your class, or else you are going to live an extremely ordinary life always wondering what might have been.  I know for myself, I have a hard time stepping outside of the box and taking risks because I don't want to fail and have to start from point A all over again.  Since I have been at college I have definitely become a better risk taker in many different aspects of my life.  I believe that everybody needs to step out of their comfort zone and experience new things.  

Final Reflection

1/2 cup of confusion

1 tpsn. of frustration

1 cup of indifference

2 cups of optimism

1 cup of creative juices

First, you add that confusion, frustration, and indifference.  It will have a sticky and gooey consistency that is hard to work with. You will have to kneed through the toughness the best that you can.  Then you first mix in the 2 cups of optimism and it will be much easier to mix.  Lastly, you put in the 1 cup of creative juices.  Then you will have a creamy and fluffy mixture.  Your final product will be great and ready to serve.  

"Wobble" is kind of an unusual word that I don't typically use.  In class, Lacy asked us about our moments of wobble, productive discomfort, at a time in this class.  I wasn't sure about this word wobble  quite yet, but I knew about a time when I had productive discomfort in my writing.  I immediately thought about the writing process of my literacy narrative.  I was really confused about what to write about and I didn't really know what I could talk about because I didn't feel as though my literacy history was all that interesting.  I wrote about my experiences with literacy but I felt like it was way too bland and Lacy told me that I should expand on my ideas and play around with some different approaches.  I tried my best to take her advice with playing around with the different approaches that I learned and read about in class.  After doing so, I still didn't have a strong sense of confidence in my writing and I didn't think that it lived up to its expectations.  I tried my best to play around and mess with different ideas and I made my literacy narrative the best that I could have.  I would work a little bit here and there but I would get so frustrated that I had to stop and work on it a different day.  I really liked that we had the choice of having a rolling due date because it allowed me to work on it when I was in the writing mood and not when I was so stressed out with my other school work.  In the end, I feel like I grew as a writer during this process because I went through a bunch of ups and downs and learned a lot.

Literacy Narrative Process

“Hhhmmm, which book should I pick out for mamma to read to me tonight?” I thought to myself and I shuffled books around on my bookshelf.  Wearing my oversized t-shirt, I had to be able to play with my belly-button, and a full belly from dinner I picked out my favorite book Love You Forever and I curled up in bed next to my mom.  She read each page with so much emotion and love and I could definitely feel that through her reading.  “I wonder what it’s going to be like when I am going to be the one reading books,” I pondered to myself as I listened to my mom read those meaningful words.  I wanted to pick out more and more books and just have her read to me all night.  I loved the different messages that all of the books had.  “It’s going to be absolutely amazing being a big girl and reading all of the books that there are out in the world.”  I thought.  I had a big love for reading, and it’s a shame that it would come to an end as I got older. 

This was the excerpt that I picked out to share with the class.  I thought that this was an interesting part of my paper because it tells a story about how my literacy history began.  To me, this writing process was extremely stressful!  When we were doing the notecard assignment in class I was honestly struggling to think of things to write down and I actually randomly wrote things down because I didn't feel as though I had anything else to write.  With my first draft I kind of collected some thoughts together and typed them up as best that I could.  It was in a completely unorganized fashion and I don't think that it made too much sense.  My next draft was a little bit better.  I made some minor changes and got more ideas written down.  I got a little side tracked with the ethnography project and forgot about my literacy narrative and I didn't work on it for a few weeks.  Once the ethnography was done I sat down to work on my narrative and I actually had a completely different mind set about the paper.  I was thinking in ways that I had never thought before and my creative juices were flowing out onto my paper.  I think that the analytical thinking that I had to do in the ethnography actually made my writing process a lot easier for my literacy narrative.  When I was writing my final draft I changed my paper a lot!  I added in some excerpts which Lacy advised me to do.  I made my thoughts more complete and completed my paper as a whole.  In the end, I'm glad that we did this paper because it made me think in different ways and come up with a topic that was all mine and allowed me to go in any direction with it.  I liked being about to revise my work as much as I wanted to and being about to play around with different ideas.

Ethnography

Quotes and Messages

For the ethnography project, my group chose to do quotes and messages.  To me, quotes are important words to live by.  The picture above is my favorite quote.  It reminds me everyday that I can do anything  possible as long as I have a good mind set.  As we worked on our project we found that we don't all have to same meanings for the same quote.  

When we were first assigned this project my group was actually really confused about what to write about.  We didn't understand what we were being asked to do.  We played around with a bunch of different ideas but we couldn't quite put our finger on what we wanted to do.  We brainstormed a bunch of different ideas and we first thought about doing a prezi, then a slide show, and then we finally decided that a powerpoint would be our best option.  Once we had the idea of going around taking pictures of quotes and messages we took off running.  Each one of us took pictures and wrote down what it meant to us.  In the end, we put all of the pictures and meaning together in a powerpoint and presented the final product to the class.  

Since we didn't really know what we were supposed to be doing in the beginning of this project we had to come up with a bunch of different ideas and change them around as we needed.  It was really nice that Lacy would come up to each group and talk about what we had and what we needed to add or change. Once we got the analysis part of the project done, we didn't have much more revising that we needed to do.   

I was in a group with Olivia Armstrong, Nikki Pacitti, and Nolan Ollis and we worked really well together.  We all pulled our own weight and we all did what we were supposed to do.  Each one of us collected pictures and shared them as a group through email.  We met at the library to discuss the meanings of the quotes and messages and we also put the powerpoint together. I liked doing this project in a group because it allowed us to put all of our ideas together and it was cool to see how we each thought of different meanings for the quotes.

I thought that doing this ethnography project in an "untraditional" was was really cool!  I had a friend that had to do this project but she had to write it in an essay format and she was not excited or interested in the project at all.  For me, I'm not big into writing papers so I was excited to be able to work with a group and use technology.  Doing it this way made it much more enjoyable and I was really excited about working in a group setting.  When we presented the projects in class it was cool to see how each group did something different.  Not one group had the same presentation.  If we did it in essay form then all of the projects would have been very similar.

Overall, I thought that this project was very interesting because each group had a very unique topic and each group put forth a lot of effort to make their project the best possible.  I also thought that it was really cool that the group topics were kind of different and nonconventional.  I would never have thought that food or clothes had an underlife, but the way the groups thought things out gave me a complete different understanding.  This project definitely made me think outside the box and think in untraditional ways.  I truly enjoyed working on this ethnography.