Day: September 10, 2023

More World Language? Definitely.

In my quality of life class, I was a part of this discourse community with around 10 other students to come up with solutions to our issue that we are researching about. While reading James Paul Gee’s writing, I relate to his learning practice of, “Semiotic Principle.” This principle relates to this discourse community by how while researching my issue, I came across different opinions about whether increasing foreign language across schools was beneficial or not. And while reading numerous texts and articles, I had to interact with both parties (is foreign language beneficial to high school students?) and understand where they are coming from since not everyone has the same opinion or perspective. This better helped me engage in this discourse community because I had to survey over 250 people, so by talking to the different classmates around me I was able to understand better on what this community is leaning towards and their opinions which helped me create a better survey to question a bigger community/population to receive a wide amount of answers. Through that I was able to see what the population leaned toward which helped me come up with a different solution combating this issue.

Additionally, the 10 students in my class were all focusing and targeting on different issue that they wanted to solve, so by communicating with each other we were able to learn from each other and gave each other advice on how their solution can be “better” or offering them a better doable solution. This all ties back to the semiotic principle because we also had to create a website about our issue which has to include images and certain word choices. For example, because different people view a certain word and image different, I had to choose good word choice that would make people sign my petition to increase foreign language classes as well as adding persuasive images that get the viewer thinking. Lastly, there are so many languages out there and some words may sound similar to another language. One word may be something good to one country, but that same word may be a bad word to another country, so different people interact with certain words based on the language they speak. This ties back to my topic since knowing more language, we can learn and communicate with proper pronunciation that wouldn’t negatively affect another country which also ties back to how we interact with certain words.

Why Are You Doing Homework? The Football Game’s On!

The author, James Paul Gee, uses his understanding of learning principles to support his claim that video games have a lot to teach us about learning and literacy. Gee is firm in his belief that there can be many experiences within different discourses that can teach literacy as well, if not better than a school setting. Personally, I’ve seen these principles be true in all the discourse groups I am a part of. I’ve specifically seen it in one particular group, my football community. In football, active learning and adapting to the situation you’re in is they key to winning. Teams study hours of film and are prepared to stop any play they’ve seen before. Therefore, teams have to come up with new routes, plays, and trickery before every match. As someone who has always been fascinated with coaching and the behind the scenes, I myself have tried mastering these concepts through reading playbooks and listening to analysts. As a result of that, I’ve gained many skills that are applicable both within that discourse and to all areas of my life. The drive to fully grasp all the details that go into a football game has definitely had a positive effect on my own life. Putting all that time into understanding something as little as football, has given me the patience to be able to listen to a teacher, role model, or businessman for long amounts of time. Furthermore, football has helped me in my ability to pick up slang and shortened words. In football, everything has a codename. The quarterback is always screaming out words that make no sense in context, but of course have paragraphs-worth of meaning. Being able to speak with no wasted words is a great skill to learn, especially in the world of texting where everyone is trying to shorten their speech.