Write about yourself

I want you to write about yourselves. Write three things that are true and one thing that is not true. For example, here are four things about me. Which one is not true?

In high school, I got straight As. After high school, I went to college and graduate school. When I graduated with my masters in English, my first job was working on the grounds crew at the university I graduated from. A few years later, I went to Africa as a member of the Peace Corps and spent 5 years there. I later lived in the Philippines where I learned to like a purple ice cream made from a root plant.

I am looking forward to seeing what you write and if we can figure out which one is not true.

Fall 2007 Beginning

For all of the students in EAP0340, welcome to blogging. This is an opportunity to write and comment on each others' writing. I want you to feel free to comment on this blog as well as your classmates' blogs as we progress this semester.

To begin, I would like you to comment on this quotation by Peter McWilliams in a book called, Life 101.

"To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the biggest mistake of all."

My favorite painting

One of my favorite paintings is “The Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Breugel, a Dutch painter from the 16th century. In the painting, the pastel blue green sky and sea center on a bright yellow sun reflecting off of the sea in the center of the painting. Closer to the viewer, a man plows his field following his horse and wooden plow with his head down concentrating on his task. Below him on the hillside, a shepherd looks up into the sky while his sheep graze on the brown plateau. Perhaps he heard a cry and looks skywards to locate the origin of the cry. We can also see a ship with the sails full of wind passing them. In the lower right corner, two legs in a pose suggesting struggle and desperation belong to the Icarus of the title. According to Greek mythology, Icarus made wings of wax that enabled him to fly, but he grew proud and flew too close to the sun causing his wings to melt and him to fall from the sky. For me, this picture suggests how as we go about our daily lives filled with the importance of our worlds, we often don’t see the daily struggles of those around us. As a teacher, I know my students only through a few hours of contact a week, and sometimes I fear that I am the shepherd who looks into the sky for a cry that he heard and misses the important action, or I am like the farmer as I am so involved in teaching grammar that I can’t see the real struggles of my students.

Everyone's on board

Jose now has a blog. Now everyone has a blog! Read your classmates' blogs and give them an idea about what you think about what they are writing about. There are some really good blogs to read as people have interesting things to say. Also, some people have some fun photos to look at.

Eating Things

Today, I asked you to complete a list of five things you would never eat. While I think there are things I would never eat, I am afraid I may have eaten some of them without knowing it such as dog and horse. In both Mali and the Philippines, some people eat dog. I can't swear that I never ate dog because I was invited to many dinners sometimes as a special guest and ate what the host or hostess gave me. In class I told you about my friend who went to the Philippines with the Peace Corps and had to eat grubs since that was what the people he lived with ate. Another teacher I worked with was in the Peace Corps in Thailand. She told of a fellow volunteer who was teaching in a village. This volunteer had gotten used to eating Thai food which occasionally included insects. Her students brought her an insect. She ate it and the students looked at her with puzzled looks, so she asked what the insect was. They told her they didn't know and wanted her to tell them.

Description: My friend Jack

I met Jack the year my mother died. My family, my father, my three brothers and I, moved from a farm to the small town in Kansas where I would live until I went to college. Our friendship began because we were about the same age, 6 and 5, and lived across the street from each other. Jack looked like he was made of angles and straight lines. His sharp featured face rested on a body of sharp elbows and thin legs. As sharp as his body was the way he spoke as he expressed strong opinions or gave orders to his younger brothers and sisters. Jack lacked grace in his movements but made up for it with a passion for any game we played. We spent many a full day and night playing baseball in our front yards, chasing our younger brothers and sisters to screams of fear and joy, climbing trees, and, in calmer moments, listening to baseball games on the radio as we played a game we had invented using baseball cards and dice. Jack and I disagreed about some important things since he was a loyal fan of my least favorite team, the New York Yankees. Still we remained friends until I moved away from home to attend college.

Spring 2007

Welcome aboard!
We will be using our blogs to do some writing and improve writing skills during this semester. I am going to try something different this semester in that I will write some of the paragraphs that I assign to you for the blogs.

Also, I want you to visit your classmates blogs and comment on them. To encourage you, I will use a different point system than in the past. This semester, I will give you 5 points for posting on your blog and 5 more points if you comment on at least 3 other blogs. I will comment on as many of your postings as I can.

Now we can get started...