Megan Pak Introduction

 

 

Hello everyone!  I’m Megan.  I am a New Orleans, Louisiana native currently living in Bradenton, Florida.  I play on the UF golf team and I have a younger sister who also plays golf competitively, but she plays for Augusta State.  I am a fourth year English major with a minor in mass communications, and I have no idea what I want to do with that after I graduate this summer.  Competitive golf has dominated my entire life ever since I was ten years old, and now that my golf career is coming to an end in a couple of months, I am lost!  Ideally, I would like to stay near the sport on the business end, such as working for the PGA Tour for example; however, teaching is another option that I have thought about, which leads me to my next point.

 

I have taken Anastasia Ulanowicz’s Adolescent Literature and John Cech’s Children’s Literature courses and loved it!  Reading Alice in Wonderland and Winnie the Pooh brings back my childhood memories.  For me, it is very fascinating to re-read the same text in depth seventeen years later and analyze its complexity even though the text seems so simple.  Maybe I am easily amused but I think it is really interesting!  I would like to spread this knowledge to others and keep children’s literature from being taken for granted.

When I hear the words “children’s literature,” I think of picture books that I enjoyed reading as a young child.  I think of Rainbow Fish, Chrysanthemum, Green Eggs and Ham, and Mama, Do You Love Me?  If I were to define “children’s literature” prior to taking LIT 4334’s first two classes this past week, I would say that it is a genre of thin books filled with colorful pictures and short sentences intended for children.  Now, I would have to say that it is a complex genre of literary works because it is written by adults for other adults to read in order to permit their children to read them.  Ironically, children are not entirely involved in children’s literature.  Finally, “Golden Age” is a term I regard as a time period where books became classics due to its pictures, morals and overall content.  To me, the term “Golden Age” seems like the turning point or an impact in our history where significant changes occurred, which lead to the way our culture perceives literature or classics today.   

Hi!

Hey ya’ll I’m Kaley Nesvacil and I am from Lakeland, FL which is in between Tampa and Orlando. I am a fourth year English major with a Professional Teaching minor. I am graduating in December and I plan on either becoming an elementary teacher or starting an English school at a church in Jaco, Costa Rica.

  

 

I decided to take The Golden Age of Children’s Literature because I wanted to learn about books that I could possibly be using in my curriculum during the future. Being that I want to teach elementary school I thought it would be a good idea to familiarize myself with classic children’s books. I also am taking this class to meet my graduation requirements. But at least I am able to take a fun class to fulfill that need! I hope to gain knowledge in what is acceptable for children to read today. I want my students and future children to be able to enjoy reading with a book that stands the tests of time. 

The book I look forward to reading the most is actually the one we are reading this week. I love fairy tales like The Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, and Cinderella; reading different versions of the stories is fascinating. Reading it so far has been fun  because the stories are completely different from the sugar-coated Disney tales and it has been very refreshing!  I must say the part of the syllabus I am not looking forward to is reading some of the critical articles. I am not much of a non-fiction reader so the notion of having to read a non-fiction article each week is not very exciting to me. But I am hoping to learn something from it.

When I think of children’s literature I think of books like Cat in the Hat, Junie B. Jones, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and The Boxcar Children or books that I was interested in as a child. But thinking back on those short stories and small novels, I have realized that they are full of adventure and fun things but many times give a moral lesson at the end. The character always evolves at the end of the novel and learns something about life. When I think of the term “children’s literature” I think of books for children that inspire imagination but also good judgement and small life lessons. As for “golden age” I believe this refers to the time period when many of the famous stories we have read were written and published. I think it was the apex of children’s literature, the time when the “classics” were read by children all over Western civilization.

 

Introductory Blog: Nicole Georges

 Hi! My name is Nicole Georges and I am a senior graduating in Political Science with a double minor in English and Theatre. I am from St. Petersburg, Florida.

I have always loved reading and as a result of growing up as an only child, I found solace and comfort from the characters that I would read about. While my outgoing personality never allows much room for silence, I am most comfortable when I find a good book that can make me forget about what is going on around me.  My love for reading began as a child, which is to some extent a  reason for taking this course; to go back to a time of innocence and naivety where my main concern was to stay up later than my bed time in order to get to the next chapter of a book. As I’ve grown older, it has become increasingly more difficult to find the time to appreciate literature, and I am hoping that this class will rekindle the love I felt every Friday night when my dad would take me to Barnes & Noble to get a new book.

It is difficult to say which text I am looking forward to reading most, because each of  these novels has in some way shaped my reading as a child. However, what I am most looking forward to in this course is the ability to revisit these timeless classics to take a more analytic look in order to assess a deeper meaning and message that I may have missed prior.

My idea of “children’s literature”, and more specifically, the Golden Age of this genre, is that this is the beginning of the imaginative minds of many children. In the fables of Peter Pan, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, children are given the ability to imagine a world completely separate from reality, to dream of the impossible. Children’s literature gives our youth the ability to use words in order to traverse to an unknown world that is not only timeless, but infinite with possibilities of what we can accomplish for the future. While I have never taken a children’s literature course before, I am anxious to learn this semester about how the novels that have shaped my life, have also shaped the lives of others and the literary community. The term “Golden Age” refers to a time in literature that is revered not only for its timelessness, but also for how it demonstrates a time of historic excellence that continues to shape society today.

While I have enjoyed many classics growing up, I find it difficult to narrow it down to one book as my favorite. I will say though, that children’s literature has helped me become the reader I am today and has opened my imagination to think outside of the box. I am extremely excited to learn more about these stories in order to continue the discovery of these the literary legacies.

Hi, I’m Sandra.

Hi, everybody.  My name is Sandra M. Mejia.  I am a 5th year student majoring in Psychology and Japanese with a minor in English and a TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) certificate.  I am a New Yorker at the core since I moved to Florida during high school.  My hope is to go back to the north after finishing schooling here in Florida and teach high school English. Also, due to my interests and having studied abroad in Japan, I want stop in Asia to teach at some point in the near future, but we’ll see what happens.

Here is a picture of me.  Be warned: my hair color changes often.  🙂

Now onto why I am taking this class.  As I said before, I want to teach high school so I thought a course on Children’s Literature would be relevant.  Now that I’ve seen the list of books we’re reading, they are definitely quite relevant, and I think it’s interesting that we’ll be analyzing them.  I’m looking forward to reading everything on the list, especially the books I’ve never even heard of like The Water Babies and The Princess and the Goblin.  I am a little worried that we have spent too much time talking about whether or not it is valid to study children’s literature or not and why it matters, so I hope we don’t come back to this topic.  Why would we have the class if it wasn’t valid, you know?  I think it’s completely valid as a field of study, and I don’t see why studying the Harry Potter series would be any different from analyzing the content and meaning of Moby Dick.  If you look at literature studies in general, it’s basically a bunch of bookworms who love to read and study what they read.  You could almost say that about any field of study in higher education.  They are full of people who are really interested in a topic and just want to share it with the rest of the world, so why not?

As for what I think defines “Children’s Literature,” I’m not sure what else to say besides children’s literature is made up of the books written with children as the intended audience and any books children themselves actually pick up to read.  I’ve never thought about trying to define what kinds of books children’s literature is comprised of, and when I was child (baby age to about 8th grade), I was quite the bookworm and read all kinds of things.  I actually don’t really care which books are defined to be children’s literature because every child is different, and how quickly they develop and age don’t always match whatever is considered “normal” or “average” so I think whatever list that would be is irrelevant when considering what a child will actually read.  However, a list would be useful to help parents in choosing books for their children when they might not know what to pick up themselves.

Anyways, I’m excited to read all the books assigned for this class and to gain new perspectives on the ones I read when I was younger.  🙂

Introduction

Hello all,

My name is Tyrel Clayton, and I am a third year student, majoring in English.  I am from an itty bitty town called Live Oak, Florida, to which I hope never to return. I make bad jokes that most people don’t get. I enjoy swing dancing, and devote most of my time and energy to perfecting that activity. I also like Doctor Who, Pokemon(,) video games, and Sherlock. I look like this on my bad days. Which is most of them.

 

I wanted to take this class because I enjoy learning about Children’s Literature.  It takes away a great deal of the stress associated with dealing with an “adult” book because its content is accessible to everyone, and everyone can reasonably add something to a conversation about children’s books. I also love the fact that a field which is based on such (so-called) simple books is actually quite complex and difficult to deal with (at least in studies with other academics).

I’m looking forward to working on my analysis skills.  Children’s books are perfect for this because  their simplicity requires you to actually work at analyzing them, you can’t just pull something out of the complex heart of darkness in the middle and run with it.

My idea of Children’s Literature is pretty straight forward: literature/books I would give or read to my kids. This, for me at least, is a pretty broad definition, and ranges from the obvious (The Cat in the Hat, Winnie-the-Pooh) to the slightly unexpected (The Hobbit, Harry Potter) to the books you might raise an eyebrow at (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet) to the, “Wait, what?” (The Canterbury Tales).

I have taken one class on Children’s Literature before, with John Cech.

I think the term “Golden Age” means the greatest era on the timeline of Children’s Lit history. It refers to when the best books were coming out–the books that we base all the other books on, the timeless books that we can still relate to today.

Introduction – Athena Kifah

 

Hi! I’m Athena, a fourth year  English Major/ Education Minor here at UF. I’m from New Smyrna Beach (which is near Daytona) and I like my town a lot – even though I never really want to live there again. I like the ocean, diet coke, ice cream, butterflies, good TV and sleeping.

This is my fourth children’s literature course (counting Grimm’s fairytales), and they have been, by far, my favorite classes at UF. I’m an education minor and plan to go into guidance counseling, so it’s a particularly interesting and applicable subgenre for me. While I love the opportunity to delve into childhood classics (and to discover those books that were classics for others), I particularly enjoy considering the ways in which these literatures affect those first learning to read (or whether or not they do at all).

Out of the texts in the syllabus, I am most looking forward to Peter Pan – one my all-time favorite stories. I think it is so beautifully heartbreaking that Wendy and Peter share such an adventure and yet at the end of the story, Wendy grows up and Peter forgets all about her (spoiler alert). We think of this as Children’s literature and likely it is but can children truly appreciate that kind of loss and separation? Or are children more able to understand it than even we are? 

“Golden Age”? What a tricky moniker. It’s difficult and controversial to canonize in any genre and in such a fledgling one as this, perhaps no truly definitive classifications can be made. I think also that children’s literature is so highly generationalized – our affinities for our favorite childhood stories are so necessarily tied up in nostalgia and some vague concept of home. “Golden Age”, perhaps, is more accurately affixed to the idea of childhood in general, to those fleeting “carefree” and “easy” years.

Introduction

Hello, I’m Sarah! I am an English major/Spanish minor and will be attending law school in the fall. My ultimate career goal is to become a child advocate, specializing in literacy and education. I’m originally  from Louisiana but I currently live in Bradenton, a small town just south of Tampa. I’m the oldest of five children and my younger sister, Hannah, is a sophomore here. I’m a huge TV fan and recently became obsessed with The Walking Dead. I also love SEC football, country music, and coffee. 

I am taking this course because I love children’s books. I took LIT 4331 over the summer and found that course extremely interesting. I really think it’s remarkable that these books which seem to have such simple plots and characters actually have deep moral meanings and raise complex issues. I am most looking forward to reading Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland. I am somewhat worried about the annotated bibliography. It’s been a couple years since I’ve written one, so I’ll need to refresh my memory. 

When I think of “children’s literature,” the images that come to my mind are picture books: Dr. Seuss, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, and The Rainbow Fish. My favorite text is Love You Forever by Robert Munsch. It tells the story of a young boy and his mother taking care of him. In the end, the roles are reversed and the son is now caring for his elderly mom. I can’t read the book without crying! I think the “Golden Age” means the epitome and rise of children’s literature. It brings up feelings of success and perfection. Some questions I have regarding this period of time is what makes certain books categorized as a product of the “Golden Age”: specific themes, the author’s status in society, etc.

 

 

introduction. Jose Cardona

Hello you guys in the literature children class, my name is Jose Adner Cardona Sofia. The reason I am taking this class is because I am fascinated about children and how they are not corrupted in their minds. I came from Cuba 8 years ago and my goal is to go to Medical School. I would like to be a Cardiologist Pediatrician and I am currently working at Shands Hospital in the Pediatrician Department. I will be graduating this semester and staying one year working on a Research project related to heart diseases. I will do it for one year and hopefully after the year is over I will be going to Medical School. I like Old School Music; I listen to 70s and 80s music all the time. I am an open person and easy to get along with. The reason I want to be a doctor and work with kids is because I felt that I grew up too early. I live in this country with my father and the rest of my family resides in Cuba. I have had to work since I was 12 and make myself independent. If you have any questions or want to get to know me just come and talk to me.

Introduction: Alex Haley

Hi kids, my name is Alex Haley. I hail from Tarpon Springs, in the Tampa Bay area, though I was born and raised in Jamaica. I’m a third year English major focusing on children’s literature, as well as a recently declared Mass Communication minor. My concentration on children’s and YA literature stems from my desire to eventually work as a development editor for YA books. I remind myself daily that this is a legitimate career goal, but I suspect that my interest in YA books only exists because I never ‘grew up’ and started reading ‘real books.’ I currently love the fairy-tale-retellings trending in YA books.

This class fits in nicely with my literary interests. I’m excited for all of the reading, especially Five Children and It, which I adored as a child. I am also interested in studying what makes these ‘classic’ texts so timelessly appealing. The group project is the most worrisome (does anyone actually like group projects? Please correct me if you do), but I’m sure a project with students in an upper level course will be much better than the ones I had to endure in high school.

For me, children’s literature includes any text that was published with children as the intended audience. I took Cech’s Children’s Literature course and Ulanowicz’s Adolescent Literature course last semester, and the latter was definitely the best class I’ve ever taken. I think the term ‘Golden Age’ means the classic, turn of the century works for children that evoke the strongest nostalgia for childhood.

When I’m not reading, I enjoy collecting vintage clothes, riding horses and swing dancing. (The facebook group link is here for any interested parties). I also sing for a twelve piece 1930’s and 40’s jazz band, which is definitely not as cool as it sounds. I’m one of the only two members under sixty.

Introductory Blog Post: Daniel

My name is Daniel. I am a junior currently majoring in English, although unwillingly. I had other goals in mind but this is where everything has lead me and I have no alternative but to ride it out and hope it leads me somewhere.

I am taking this class because it a 3000 level or higher class, which is needed to complete critical tracking. I honestly do not have much interest in children’s literature because I outgrew that phase long ago. I prefer reading something more thought-provoking and mature. That being said, it is interesting to learn about the conflict and uncertainty of children’s literature. I do like how this class assesses my comprehension of the texts. I am looking forward to reading Winnie The Pooh and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I’ve read those as a child and would like to see I view those books now. I don’t enjoy participation in any class because I’d rather listen than contribute, and because it is characteristic of grade school. I’m indifferent about group projects because I prefer working by myself as opposed to a group because I don’t like relying on other people; however, I am open to their opinions.

My idea of “children’s literature” is any text that a child can read. It’s an extremely vague classification because the line at which one stop beings a child, physically and mentally is an arbitrary notion. I do not think the issue that is going on today is so important. There is no question that different texts can be viewed critically and be assessed differently, but just let a child read what he or she wants. As for my favorite texts, I enjoyed most of Dr. Seuss’s books and I really liked Winnie the Pooh. I think the term “Golden Age” is a reference to the period in which most of the widely-known “classics” were written by wealthy, white men. The term itself seems somewhat haughty and representative of historical oppression.