Letter To Myself

Dear Daniel,

            High school projects are a very important part of your high school career. They are not only a big part of your grade but they also teach you more then what you learn in class. That is why it is very important to get them done and also not to wait to the last minute to do them. I have a very big problem with procrastination. When teachers gave a deadline that was a week away. I always thought I didn’t have to start it for another couple days. But those 2-3 days turn into 5-6 days and then before you know it it’s the day before its due and you have barley anything done. The reason teachers give the long deadline is to give you enough time to be successful with your project and to take your time to make it the best thing that you can do. There were of project I had to do throughout my high school career that I wish I took more seriously. I wish I wouldn’t have waited till the last couple days to start on them. They never turned out how I wanted and they weren’t my full potential. The advice I have for you is to keep up with all your work. Don’t wait till the last minute to do your projects and homework. Take the time given to you and use it wisely. Don’t procrastinate and have to think of something at the last minute because it won’t turn out how you think it will and the teacher won’t be grading your full potential. In high school there is no room to procrastinate and wait. If you wait then you forget and then it either never gets done or you fall behind and are stuck playing catch up for the rest of the year. The same thing goes for college. And there is no one there to get on you about turning in your homework or getting your grades up. You are on your own now and you’re an adult so the mistakes you make are your own choices and you have to deal with them. So the whole point of this letter to you is to tell you to not procrastinate. Make sure you take school seriously and get everything done on time. The more you wait the worse it going to turn out for you and your grade.

Reflection Guidlines

I was very nervous about this project. The thing I was the most nervous about was making it the length that it needed to be. I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to make my redesign 5-7 pages long. I ended up choosing my ad with some help from y group and mostly my professor and got some ideas from them on what to do with this redesign. The idea that I came up with came from a little help of my group but I saw what I was going to do in my head first and then tried to describe it all on paper. Some of the challenges I faced were things like how to start it and also how to describe the redesign without using the first person voice. I liked how we got to use our imaginations to make our own ad and put our own touch into it. I learned how to really look hard into the ads I see to try and figure out what they really mean and what they are trying to say. The only thing I could have different is make my paper longer. Maybe add some more details or ideas into it.

Ford F-150 Commercial

Ford F-150

The Ford F-150 commercial has so much going on in it. It refers to so many different types of audiences and situations. They talk about how people that have trucks are mostly because they need them for their work. So the people in the commercial are really focusing on those types of people that are working hard to make money so now there’s a truck that can save them some money. They also hit on a very important topic which is gas. They explain how gas is really high now and they explain that this truck has good gas mileage and can help them with this high gas price problem. The target audience is definitely everyone who owns a truck already. They focus on a bunch of things that people with a truck need to have and also what they want. Such as good gas mileage, towing, more room, and just an all-around great truck. I have a dominant-hegemonic view on this commercial. I agree with the whole commercial about how gas is up and we need a truck that isn’t a gas guzzler and also they make the point that a lot of Americans don’t have a truck because they want it, they have a truck because they need it.

Process Memo

Daniel Stieler

Lauren Rinke

Composition 150

10-11-12

Process Memo

Writing my literacy narrative was fun for me. I loved going back through pictures and remembering all those fun times. The hardest part for me was trying to really remember the very beginning of my literacy. It was hard to remember because I was so young and I don’t remember much from being that little. But I could remember some pieces and that’s what helped. One thing I realized that I never really thought of about my literacy is that I actually was being taught by my mom and grandma when they would read to me at night. I just thought they were reading to me to put me to sleep or calm me down but now I realize what it was all for. The one theme that I noticed about my writing was that my whole literacy came from books. I focused on talking about how my grandmas reading helped me learn at first and then once I learned then I increased my reading skills. It was really hard trying to pick what I should focus on because there’s so many possible ways to my own literacy that it’s hard to remember or figure out which one you think helped you the most. Creating the time line helped me a lot with this writing. It helped me remember everything that happened and how reading was fun for me and then how I lost interest. It helped me remember step by step what happened. Choosing what to focus on for my actual narrative writing wasn’t that hard for me. I basically narrowed it down in my timeline already so I knew that I was going to be writing about how reading got me to this point. When I started to write my paper I just organized it by my timeline that I used in class. I just took all the things I wrote in my timeline and elaborated on the events and gave some examples of events in my life. The peer review stage helped me a lot with my paper. It told me what I needed to fix or reword or what to add. There were some things that I had written that didn’t translate right when the other person read it so that helped so I could change it \. It also helped because there were a couple parts where I needed more detail for it to make sense and I didn’t do that so it helped just bring everything together. The peer review also really helped because they kind of helped us by underlining what they thing we should put into our videos so that helped a lot. When I did my final editing I really wasn’t thinking about making the video yet. I was just trying to make everything fit together and tell my story so that people could understand like I wanted them to. I think the sentences my partner chose were perfect. The sentences were the main points of my story and the sentences summarized the whole story so it was great. I used all mostly all of the sentences that she chose because I felt like they were the most important and the best ones to summarize my whole story. The most difficult thing out of my entire project was trying to get my sentences down to that 52-character max. I just felt like I couldn’t make sense of any of my sentences with that short of a text. That was the longest part of my whole project. The images that I used for my video where to kind of put a visual to what I was saying in the previous slide. The pictures that I used were mostly of me and my family but mixed in were some I had to get off of the computer. But it all just helped me describe more of what I was saying. The music was hard for me to make a connection to my video. I couldn’t really find anything that had a direct connection to it but the one I chose felt like it fit. It was kind of an upbeat and happy song which most of my story was happy. I feel like I did well for the most part. I know there are a couple slides that I wish I could rewrite or reword but everything thing else translate well for me and comes out just how I wanted it to. 

Digital Upgrade

Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade

1.       I think my teachers could have prepared me better by using a lot more technology in their teaching. Such as doing assignments through the computer and also doing their lectures by computer and slide shows. Also by putting the important things on a website like Moodle so that kids could always have access to them.

2

.       I know for a fact that I will have to use computers because that’s how everything is now. I think so far Oakland has done a very f\good job of preparing me for that because almost everything is online and that helps me get use to all of the new websites and technology.

3

.       I feel that I can write more comfortable on the computer just because its more private and I can keep mostly to myself, at least until I’m done writing.

4

.       If I were I teacher I would try to use technology the most I could. I would do online assignments such as ALEKS and maybe do something in class with online assignments or maybe answering questions through a text or use the i>Clickers like some teachers already do.

5

.       I agree with what Virginia Heffernan is saying in this article. I agree that a lot of the jobs that we have now won’t be here or won’t be the same when we get older. There is going to be more technology involved in everything we do by then that it will be impossible to avoid. So we need to start now in preparing for these future jobs and even for the ways that people will be teaching in the future.

Literacy Timeline

My Literacy Timeline

When I was younger I always loved reading books. The first book I remember my mom and grandma always reading to me was the creation of the sleepy bear dunes. It was a mythical story about how it was made and either my mom or my grandma would read it to me almost every night.

I also loved another book that just for the pictures in it.  It showed all of these cool animals and how they would live. I never could remember the name of the book I just knew it as the book with the animals in it.

I started to like books early on because of pictures mostly. The understanding of what those pictures were and what they meant came later on with the help of my mom. So I loved to see all the animals and funny pictures in all the little kids books that we had.

As I grew older I began to read quite a bit. I loved reading mystery and adventure books. Books like the Michigan Chillers and American Chillers series. I’ve read almost every one of them in both series.

But later on around 7^th and 8^th grade I started not to read as much. Playing sports became a bigger and more exciting thing for me to do. So with school and sports, the time for reading just wasn’t there anymore.

Once high school came around I didn’t really read at all anymore. The only things I read were the books that 

I had to for school and they didn’t interest me. That made me start to not like reading.

I never had time to read anything that I wanted. I had school, sports, homework and now a job.

So now my understanding of literature/literacy started to come from watching TV and movies and also listening to music.

But now that my sports are done since I’m in college, I'm hoping to get back to reading more.

Lynda Barry Literacy Summary

Lynda Barry started off her literacy when she was young like a lot of people did. She found that she became literate by drawing pictures. She loved to draw. It made her feel good about herself and as she said, it made her feel weightless. But one day she drew a picture that got her in trouble. It was a bad picture. And from then on she always found herself asking the 2 questions. “Is this good?” and “does this suck?” She could never get that feeling back that she use to have when she drew. That feeling of weightlessness and accomplishment. She wasn’t having fun drawing anymore because of those 2 questions she always had to ask herself. But one day she finally just answered “I don’t know” to those questions and that changed everything. It showed that you don’t have to know if it’s good or not. If you like it then it can only be good. The message that I gain from Lynda’s story is that to be confident in your writing and in the topic you are writing about and you won’t have to answer those questions and doubt yourself.