It has always been a passion of mine to be a High School English teacher. The freedom of expression that comes from English drives my passion to be an English teacher. I have worked with kids all my life and to give back to the community by teaching is something I strive to do. I am currently working towards my bachelor degree in secondary education and English with a minor in Spanish.

I also plan on coaching. I have played football since the 5^th grade. I lettered three times in high school and played two years in college at Valparaiso university.

My future goals are to receive a master’s degree in English and eventually a PhD in English and teach at the college level. For the meantime I will be here enjoying every single one of your students. J

In this class we will be examing many forms of British Literature.

This is a freshmen year class.

 

http://www.bardweb.net/

                I included this in my resource file because it is a great resource center for Shakespeare. I might use this for several reasons, to show different video clips of certain scenes within a play or to find extent manuscripts of his plays to compare to the edited versions and talk about the subtle differences. This would raise a lot of questions. This will help my students see different angles of each play and how a play might differ is someone says a line another person is supposed to say.

http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/

                This site is a great source for everything Shakespeare. Whenever there is any new news or interesting ideas about Shakespeare this site will have it. It is also a site filled with scholarly sources for the students to use as sources for information or ideas. For the students it has a lot of great links like timelines and extant manuscripts and other sources like such. It also has links to books and DVDs and videos.

http://www.projectexplorer.org/

                This site is awesome for a lot of reasons. First it has resources for all level ranging from grade school to educators. For educators it has links to lesson plans all around the world for certain subject areas. This will be a useful tool for teachers who are looking for new angles on their teaching. For students it allows for them to see things and places they have never seen before. For example they have classroom strategies for UK students to learn Shakespeare. 

http://www.teachersfirst.com/spectopics/shakespeare.cfm

                This site is specifically geared to college and high school level students who want to find resources for Shakespeare. This site is different from the other because it has a mixture of blogs and podcasts and other things that have been aids to Shakespeare. It has also historical and background information that might be useful to set the scenes for the students in certain plays to they can get a better sense of the era. I recommend it for any teacher who needs resources for Shakespeare.

http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/resource_lit.shakespeare.html

                This site is great starting points if you have your students do research papers on Shakespeare. It has hyperlinks and other great sources linked on the website and would be a very helpful source for the students. It will help the students learn more about Shakespeare and his era. The problem that some students have with writing research is where to start so this would be a great site to introduce them to.

Unit Plans and Lesson Plans

http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/exploration-romanticism-through-poetry-1142.html

                This is resource for Romanticism unit plan. It has 10 lessons which all lay out with different activities each day. It also has what standards should apply. It also gives a nice little guide for the teacher for instruction and what the focus should be on. I like this resource because it has multiple lessons that are really engaging for students and it also a great tool to look at when I can’t think of a good lesson so when I really need a source of inspiration.

http://www.tcnj.edu/~estes2/unit.htm

                This is another unit website for American Romanticism, but this is for 12^th grades honors class. The difference between the one above the one I have here is that they focus on two different aspects of romanticism. While the other one is more geared to 9^th grade with fun learning activities these lessons foster individual thinking, which is a characteristic of romanticism, and the work load is much harder. I would be able to use

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/rom.html

                This resource is a website that has a lot background information on a lot of the time periods we will encounter in our career as an English teacher. It has background information all the way from Beowulf to modern day reading. It is a great site for the first day of units in which you introducing the unit and the background information. I would use this in my class because it gives accurate dates and it also has very detailed information on the time period. It shows the characteristics of each period and then attempts to define why they were important to the time period.

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/hum_303/romanticism.html

                This website marks the transition from one period to another. It acts as a supplement to the website about except this one is specifically geared towards romanticism and how it changed the way the world is viewed and what it has done for the literary world. I would use this in my romanticism unit because it shows how romanticism is still alive in the world today. It puts emphasis on the individual and the imagination, something we didn’t have as much of before that. This is a great website and is a good resource for a romantic unit!

http://www.evenanerd.com/uploads/6/4/5/7/64578/gwhitehouse_evenanerd.pdfe

The title says it all, how to make a boring subject interesting. This is great for teachers because we encounter a lot of kids in the classroom who say, “This is boring” or “why are we doing this” well this article claims to have the answer. It shows you how to make the topic interesting by bringing in 3 main themes and creating one liners that are funny for the kids. I believe when the poetry units roll around or the Shakespeare units roll around this would be a good resource to find ways to get the kids attention and want to learn about it.

Star Wars!- Evidence of American Romanticism. http://www.stjohns-chs.org/english/romod/odsw.html

                This is another awesome source because it is drawing on outside resources to show how romanticism still lives in the world today. What really makes it interesting is that it is comparing romanticism to Star Wars, a classic in the movie world. It is just a great resource for teachers when they are trying to make a lesson fun because they can show clips from certain scenes and ask the students what qualities are being portrayed. It sounds like a lot of fun for the students and the teachers.

Abercrombie, L. (1963). Romanticism. New York: Barnes and Noble.

http://hufflessons.pbworks.com/w/page/8203226/American%20Romanticism

This is a blogging website and I think seeing as the times are changing to a more a media based society, I only saw it fitting to put this in there. Blogs are a great way to let the students voice their opinions in an less professional setting. This allows for the students to be themselves a little more and to create and identity as a reader. This will also be a great to get a informal assessment and can fuel the discussion for the class the next day. This would be a great way to get the students actively engaged.

http://drmarcdbaldwin.com/2011/09/be-romantic-7-imaginative-tips-for-writing-like-the-romantic-poets/- This link is awesome!

                This is a romanticism website in which it focuses specifically on how to write romantic poetry. It lays out all of the concepts that correlate with romanticism. This then shows you how the poetry of the romantic era is best reached and to what extent you should put yourself into the poem. Seeing as romanticism puts emphasis on the individual and imagination, poetry is the best form of expression for this kind of work. In the classroom this will be a great resource to use to help the kids get started if they are going to write their own poems. It shows them steps to making a good poem and how to achieve the overall tone or mood you want to achieve.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhOyI-SjU-g

                This source is YouTube, which is a website that allows you to watch videos. It seems that YouTube is starting to play a bigger role in the classroom because it has a lot of information. It has so many videos that it can be a great resource to use to clarify something or to help explain something. I think YouTube can be a good way to get the students interest and has the ability to grab the student’s attention.  I would use this in the classroom for clarification on Beowulf or Shakespeare and it makes the student learning experience a lot more fun.

www.twitter.com

                I put twitter up here for a few reasons. I took a class that was media based and we used twitter as a form of assessment. It was really run. We had to tweet while we were reading. We would tweet thoughts and ideas and questions we had about the reading and it made a real fun experience to be a student. Seeing as there is an ever growing popularity of twitter, to the extent that they are putting all the tweets in the national library of congress, it is only fitting to incorporate this into my resource file.

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/

                This website is also an awesome website because it promotes poetry. Poetry out loud is a national recitation contest in which people from all over the country write original pieces of poetry and performs them on stage. The reason I include this in my resource is because poetry seems to be a good writing form/ outlet for kids to express their emotions and feelings. It would also be fun to do a poetry unit with your class and submit them into the contest.

http://www.teachitworld.com/

                This website is really good for all teachers because it has a lot of resources that would help with class. It would be a great site to go to for audio examples and games to play in class. It pretty much has everything to do with English and especially for English teachers. It has online interactive games for grammar which are done on the white board. It also has job searches and free pdfs. It is just a site for resource machines. I would recommend his site to any English teacher.

http://teacher2b.com/strategies/teachstr.htm

                This is a great resource for teachers who need teaching strategies in all areas. It has teaching strategies ranging from extra credit all the way to time filling activities, not that we will need any of those. This site is an overall good site when you are stuck and need to find inspiration for a certain style of teaching. In the classroom I would use this by looking for different techniques to get 100 percent of student engagement outside of just TPT’s , although I would argue that these are tpts as well. Very good resource to have on file!

http://teacher2b.com/discipline/discistr.htm

This is also from teacher2b website and it just gave me another great source. How often do you encounter new teacher who need to learn how to control their classroom? Well this is the site that gives you tips and guidelines to follow so that you can have better classroom discipline and better classroom management.  It shows you how to fit the time with crime and how to control your classroom when you don’t have them under control. This is a great site because I know that these are ideas and things that I worry about when I am going to become a teacher. Another great resource!

http://teacher2b.com/non-fiction/nonficwr.htm

                This resource is great for people who need help in thinking of ways they want to approach composition in the classroom. It has multiple unit plans that range from 9^th grade to college which all focus on the ways to approach composition, what are some of the best methods and how to ensure students are going to give the paper their all. It talks about all the different types of writing and how to teach them. The great thing about this is that they have all been tested in the classroom with feedback on all of them. A really good source to use when you need composition resources.

Valparaiso University
Emilio Alcaraz