Change

Four Perfect Pebbles chp9 "America at Last"

This final chapter in the book was more informative than narrative compared to the other chapters. I didn't feel as much of Marion or Ruth in this chapter as I have in the other chapters. I was still disheartened by the fact that things were still so hard for the Blumenthal family. I so wanted there to be a happy ending to the story, though there was a happy ending I wished it would be more immediate and easy for the family. After everything they experience and all the almost it seems only fair that they get a chance at something easy, but nothing was easy they worked very hard for everything they earned. The ember of the fruitfully happy ending that I read was how Albert and Mario were able to succeed in life, work and education. Especially Marion being able jump to her proper grade. Also to see her find love, unexpectedly albeit, warmed my spirit. What warmed my spirit even more was hearing the kind of emotion that Marion had when speaking about all her experiences and then the glowing smile that she had when she talked about her husband, her love, and her family. To be able to have that much joy in her life now compared to her childhood was the happy ending I was looking for, it just took a little longer to get there.

Keene chp7 Nothing Changes as Certain as Change

This chapter is all about change and allowing the world to mold and change our actions. As educators we need to be able to change our teaching to meet the needs of the students we also need to be able to change the direction of a lesson based on the insights that children come up with. The mentor portion of this text was the most interest portion to read next the to the figures at the end of the chapter on text structures and deciphering those structures. Otherwise the chapter kept referring to the new teacher "Tracy" and hypothetical meetings and analogies that I felt were not helping the theme of change in the text.

I also liked how Keene described the infrastructure of texts how it is understood and how students can use the infrastructure to make prediction of what might happen next in the book. Being able to read the "contours" of the text was an interesting concept that I have never thought of in those terms.