Reading Don't Fix No Chevys

The book that I am reading is "Reading Don't Fix No Chevys".  It is about the literacy of young boys in our school systems.  I am reading the first two chapters currently.  It is so true that boys are not allowed to express themselves in schools.  From my own experiences, I am a girl, I have seen how girls are encouraged so much more than boys in our education systems.  Boys are not allowed to play fight, but girls can play "house".  Boys know the difference between play fighting and real fighting, so why aren't we letting our little guys become men?  The teaching sphere is dominated by women, and I don't think that we think about how much "girly" stuff we impose on the boys.  In the book, the authors talk about how, to boys, literacy is feminine so they go to great lengths to avoid it at all costs!  I never thought of literacy being gender oriented, but it truly is.  We do not want our young boys writing about death and war when they are in elementary school, but we let the girls write about romances.  I feel like the school system is against boys from the start, and there are things that we need to change.  Boys statistically read more informational texts than novels.  This is true in my own life.  I have read 6 novels so far this summer, and my husband has not read a single one.  But, he has read at least 15 informational car magazines.  In school, however, we are telling our boys in literature classes that they need to read these novels that they have no interest in.  Why do we do this to them? Are they really learning anything?  I don't think my husband remembers a single novel that he was forced to read in school but he can tell you the quarter-mile time, 0-60 time, and curb weight for any car in existence today.   When I start teaching I really want my little men to become men by doing what they want to do as far as reading.  As far as I am concerned, as long as they are reading, I don't care what the content is.  This book is incredibly interesting, and I really recommend it especially for women because we never went through these experiences in school.  This could be seen as a different Discourse that we can never be in, but we can come to understand it somewhat through studying it.  

Blogging about Blogging

I have had a blast learning how to blog.  I learned a lot from my sister and reading her blogs.  She went to Uruguay for a semester last year and was constantly blogging about her experiences.  It is such a great way of mass communicating with people when you don't want to share your story about your trip over and over again.  My sister, when she came home, would tell people to read her blog whenever they asked her about the details of her trip.  My cousin teaches English in South Korea and has had a blog going for over three years.  Hers is by far my favorite blog that I have ever read.  The key to blogging, I think, is to be real about what is happening and saying whatever you are really feeling about your situation.  It never hurts when those feelings are hilarious either.  A lot of the blogs that I read, which were all friend's blogs, varied day to day in length.  I think that people only have so much time to get their feelings down on to paper.  A lot of the blogs are interesting because it is for other people to have insights into their lives, so they are not always being completely honest about situations.  The majority of my friends were pretty consistent about using correct grammar, but the occasional slang would pop up every now and again.  My cousin's page is great because she is immersed in a culture that is completely foreign to her.  She has no idea what people are saying unless they are speaking to her in English.  Her blog is the one I will post a link to.