Hello, we are starting our second phase of literacy boot camp. And I have this document here for you, of course, titled literacy boot camp, what we're doing and why we're doing it. You guys know from the other classes that I've been doing this English teaching stuff for what is now almost a quarter century, pushing 25 years now. And this medium, of course, was not available in 1996, when I started actually did student teaching in 1995. And it's nice to be able to talk to you guys. This way.

It's quite amazing what technology is able to do, but I want to get started with even in the old days, makes me feel pretty old. But even the old days when all I had was a chalkboard and books on the ledge along this side of the classroom, even then, there are certain things that always worked. One is to have a big overall idea of why we're doing what we're doing. And what I mean is basically, you should be able to talk to your teachers and your instructors and ask them, why are we doing this? What's the point? Now?

It's difficult to handle this kind of thing in school, because so much of what school has become is a little strange, right? Some of it's almost a little weird in the sense because it seems like you're just jumping through hoops and doing six and a half hours of day of a day of who knows what, but most teachers I've found or decent folks, and what they want to do is provide you with something that will help you later and I have found that having an overall view, very important, what are you doing that will help students and that's why I always have a couple of tenets that I use to instruct people. And one of them is the material that we do in class allows you to think for yourself and that's The English class that I teach, that's the stuff that I'm going to put online later when it comes to how to interpret literature.

Because the writers of the past, everybody from Homer to Toni Morrison, to Edgar Allan Poe, to Maya Angelou, to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens. Some of my favorites like Ray Bradbury, you have people like Michael Creighton, what they were doing is they were trying to get you to think for yourself, you want to take a real quick interlude. Hit pause on this, take 15 minutes and read Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut. That'll get you thinking for yourself. That'll talk to you about the future. Kurt Vonnegut from the grave makes you think for yourself reading that short story Harrison Bergeron.

But that's literary analysis. You can't do that kind of thing. Well, if you're not literary or what's the word I'm looking for, if you're not literate to the point that you can do the literary analysis, literature can be difficult. And so what happens is if you're going to read last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, or you're going to read, let's say, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, you're going to need to be literate enough to handle it. And then here's the other part. When you need to communicate, both spoken and written word, you need to have done two things you need to have understood what did you read, and then you need to write or speak about it in a way that is clear.

Make sense? complicated shows that you can think on your own and then you can compete, then you can navigate the world. That's why I have the basic concepts that I have in front of you. Because the metaphor I use the comparison that I use to talk about what's going on now is an educational nutrition crisis. And what I mean by that is much of the complexity and rigor of the instruction when it comes to literacy and reading and grammar has been taken out of the curriculum. How do I know this?

Because all of the grammar books that I use it at work now when I'm doing this in the 21st century, they all come from the 1980s. The books I've saved are from the veteran teachers that were teaching. These were older people when I got into teaching in the late 90s and early 2000s. And I took their grammar books when they retired, and they're all old. And there aren't really new ones, not in my workplace anyway. And it is kind of case where I think it's defeating.

If that's the right word I'm looking for either I think it's defeatist to just give up and be like, Well, I didn't learn this in school, so therefore I can't figure it out. That's not one of my I'm gonna subscribe to that. That's why what am i concepts is the nutrition that you would have in food if it were taken out, you'd be eating and you wouldn't be getting anything useful. While you're going to school for six and a half or seven hours a day. What are you getting that's useful, one of the things that you need to have is literacy skill that is very high, possibly beyond belief with regard to all of the information that you get now. So as a side note, one of the other basic concepts I do that gets me through and remember I work in a bad neighborhood school, I don't work at a high end school, I don't work at a private school, I don't work in a nice neighborhood.

I work in a bad neighborhood. And what gets me through and allows me to experience success. Is that a lot of what I do is what I told you before, how can you be able to work and navigate and have intellectual self defense. And the other thing is, a lot of what you're taught is wrong, or a lot of what you're taught is part of the story. And the part there are other parts of the story that had been left out. And again, that's literally literature analysis, that's analysis of books and writers.

And that's not what we're doing here. We're looking at the basic bricks in the foundation that you're going to need in order to write and speak well. That's why when you take a look at number six, active literacy, writing and speaking, that's what we're working on. So rather than have vitamin and mineral free food rather than eat marshmallows, we want steak and potatoes. We want some dark green vegetables with that. We don't want Doritos and marshmallows for dinner.

We just don't. We want meat and potatoes and some steamed broccoli on the side. Sorry, but that's what's gonna get you through, rather than the junk that you get fed now. So when you take a look at number three, it takes communication skills to navigate life. That's where this comes from. In order to do especially now think about how fast things are going, think of the amount of verbiage that's tossed your way.

You get words and tweets and social media posts, and there are still newspapers and there's books that come out. And you have to do a book report and you've got school and you've got your parents and friends and text messages. Things are going quickly. You're the internet age, you get it. This isn't something that you're not used to, but you need the building blocks. To get things done correctly.

You wouldn't say well, let me learn how to play baseball. So I'm gonna I'm going to be a pinch hitter. The bottom of the ninth in the World Series, and that's how I'm going to learn, that would be foolish. So what you're going to do is you're going to start at the bottom and you're going to work your way up. Remember, there are no secrets. The only secret is that there are no secrets.

Unless work is a secret. That's all you need to know you're going to work at this and some of it isn't gonna be fun, but too bad. Do you want to be good? Or do you want to be weak? The other thing is number five, what level of literacy Do you need so that you do not get manipulated when you're on your own? What if someone skill doesn't around you?

What are you gonna do if you're in freshman year college, and you don't really understand what's going on? And the people around you seem to get it? What if those other people that the better school they come from, they get it? Why do they understand it and you don't? It evens the playing field. One of the corny things in the school world that is actually Through his education levels, the playing field, and if you're bright, and your literacy skills are high end, then it doesn't matter what they're throwing at you, you're going to be able to handle it.

Because you're going to be a literacy superstar. And people may think, oh, that person comes from that area. So he or she doesn't get it, but you do. And why? Because you're able to understand words, phrases, that's what we're working on now. And any bit of writing and speaking, that's number six, again, that is put your whey is clear.

And that's really the justification for why we're here. You need to know what we're doing and why we're doing it. A phrase is something where you have a bunch of words together. I don't have a class on the word. Write individual words are exactly what we know. We have words and we know how to use them.

Well, we're gonna phrase is just a group of words. And each group of words just like a, like a bag of words, in a certain order, they actually play a role in a sentence. And that's why we're starting there. Right? We have literacy boot camp, one where we look at how sentence or made sentences are made. And now we have literacy boot camp to the phrase one of the building blocks in the hierarchy of English language.

So that's what we're doing. That's why we're doing it. This is literacy boot camp, class two. Let's get started. And it'll be fun. It's going to be when you're when it's all done.

You see, you'll see it'll be a way that the will make the language world the English world, the reading and writing world. It'll make it much more clear. And you'll have peace of mind. Let's get go.