Hello all,
I’ll be honest, when I saw that we had to make a short blog post introducing ourselves to the class, I saw it as an opportunity to show off some creativity and wit. However, when I looked through everybody’s post, I realized that all of the posts were already creative and very well-written, so I’ve had to go back to the drawing board.
Here we go – I am Jacob Smith, and this is my first semester in the M.A. in English program. I finished my undergraduate degree last December by student teaching in 8th and 10th grade English classrooms, and then I took a semester off because student teaching kicked my butt and I needed to recover a little bit. I now feel quite refreshed and excited to be a student again, and I think this class should only add to those feelings, because it seems quite interesting. I particularly enjoyed reading the three articles for our first class — it was nice to read relevant and more casual writing for the first day of a class.
Along with being a student at SUNY Cortland, I am also a Community Support Aid at the JM Murray Center here in Cortland (basically I help people with disabilities become more independent in their lives and communities). I also write seasonaly for a high school wrestling website named cnywrestling.com, but thanks to ol’ Covid-19, high school sports are in jeopardy this year. I am also a big passions guy — I love having things I am passionate about, finding new passions, and hearing about other people’s passions. To keep things quite vague, I would say my biggest passions/hobbies are sports, entertainment, and writing.
Picking two topics I would like to learn more about this semester was hard to put into words, but here goes nothing:
- I would like to learn more about ways people have appropriately and effectively introduced conversations regarding race, gender, and sexuality in secondary classrooms through reading selections, assignment ideas, etc.
- I would like to learn more about the power of the stuff that we read regarding race, gender, and sexuality. For example, where are the most powerful pieces regarding these topics published? Does the power still come from newspapers and magazines, whether online or in print, or has the power shifted to pieces posted on social media?
If you read all of this, I am sorry if it was too long, but thank you, and I appreciate you!
Oh, and I have a cat. There’s no way I could leave this out after seeing all of the other cat posts (which, by the way, made me so happy to see). Maybe one day all of our cats should have a Zoom meeting together.
