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Learning

I found this image and it made me laugh, because this is how I feel a lot of students view learning. It is strict and you can forget about having any fun at all when it comes to learning. However, I found this project one of the best projects, as well as one of the most rewarding I have ever had in any of my classes, ever.

I feel like this project allowed me to really sit and work through my own mind and thought process, not pick and chose other opinions as would have been seemingly expected of me in a research paper. I could really just go at this project and it was the only project I found myself really sitting and taking the time to work on before the due date. I find myself with this, not searching so much for information, but analyzing what I took from the books, what I found through Calvino and McNab and applying it to something that I loved and enjoyed.

With most research papers, I find that you're given a topic, usually one you don't really care about and then are asked to defend a prose that you didn't come up with or oppose a prose that you haven't ever thought of or maybe don't really care to oppose or agree with. In this project, however, we learned just as much, if not more, than a research paper and we got to discuss and look at things that interested us as students, but not just as students, as people. We were able to explore deeper into things that really mattered to us. For me, this wasn't just an assignment, but a way to examine why I liked something and all the reason I really liked it.

I thought it would be hard, something that we would struggle with, which I did. I found this new form of freedom and such hard to really understand at first. I got frustrated so many times with all the different things that I was learning and didn't really think on how they would really effect my teaching and my knowledge of books. However, I find myself going back to Calvino when I looked at something on TV or going to McNab when helping explain the purpose of what he had put in his band logo. The colours he chose and how and why they were significant and even the font he used and the interpretation of the DNA strand in his logo.

This is a perfect way to teach how our world is changing to a much more computer literate culture. I remember my cousin, who struggled with reading, listening to Audiobooks so he could complete assignments. Now I'm looking at things that will explain the concept of many different stories in a way that is fun and intriguing for students. I will be sure to use E-lit in my teaching, even if it's just for a brief overview or even for a fun way to study different novels and not so fun concepts.