Macara+Oshida

My name is Macara Oshida and I am a Secondary Education English major at Clemson University, in Clemson, South Carolina. I am a native Californian; however I've lived most of my life on the East Coast in Fairfax, Virginia. At Clemson University, I am a Writing Fellow, as well as a member of the Clemson University Sailing Club and Race Team. In the past I have also had amazing opportunities to intern with the non-profit organizations Martha's Table and the International Child Art Foundation. In my spare time, I love to play volleyball, read, write, be outdoors, and spend time with my friends and family.

=**Useful English Websites:**=

**The Oxford English Dictionary**
OED Online The Oxford English Dictionary is useful for anyone trying to be an effective reader and writer. It provides easy access to academic definitions of words throughout history, as well as literary examples.

**Purdue OWL: MLA Formatting Guide**
Purdue OWL: MLA Formatting Guide Purdue OWL provides students and teachers with a reliable, up-to-date guide for formatting citations, bibliographies, and documents in accordance with the Modern Language Association.

Poll Everywhere
Poll Everywhere Quick, anonymous text message polling.

**Glogster**
Glogster is a fun site that lets you make creative, interactive posters. In a future classroom, one way I could use Glogster would be for an interactive book cover activity. Students could design a cover including text, pictures, and animation to represent a specific class. They could even choose a theme song or music video to go with it. Another way to potentially utilize Glogster in a high school English classroom would be to create character pages. With their Glog, students could demonstrate understanding of characterization. In a similar twist, students could use a Glog to show what they know about a specific author and include photos, facts, and other information.

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 * A Comet Appears **
 * The Shins. ** W ritten by [|James Mercer]

One hand on this wily comet Take a drink just to give me some weight Some uber-man I'd make I'm barely a vapor

They shone a chlorine light on A host of individual sins Let's carve my aging face off Fetch us a knife Start with my eyes Down so the lines Form a grimacing smile

Close your eyes to corral a virtue Is this fooling anyone else? Never worked so long and hard To cement a failure

We can blow on our thumbs and posture But the lonely is such delicate things The wind from a wasp could blow them Into the sea, With stones on their feet Lost to the light and the loving we need

Still to come, The worst part and you know it There is a numbness In your heart and it's growing

With burnt sage and a forest of bygones I click my heels Get the devils in line A list of things I could lay the blame on Might give me a way out

But with each turn It's this front and center Like a dart stuck square in your eye Every post you can hitch your faith on Is a pie in the sky Chock full of lies A tool we devise To make sinking stones fly

And still to come, The worst part and you know it There is a numbness In your heart and it's growing.

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**My Lyric Response:**
I was surprised when I read the song's title and realized immediately that I knew and liked it, although I'd never thought much about the lyrics before. Knowing The Shins, I wasn't surprised that the song wasn't upbeat, but instead had a more melancholy, thoughtful tone. The word choice throughout the song also supports this tone; Mercer's imagery appears to be consistently negative. Examples include the speaker being "barely a vapor," "sins," the image of carving one's face with "a knife," "grimacing," etc. I find the dark imagery and language throughout the song to be interesting since the title is "A Comet Appears." For me, comets are shooting stars--they connote wishes, hopes, once in a lifetime events. Comets are something you wait a whole lifetime to see. Then I wonder if the melancholy nature of the song connects less with the comet appearing, and more the fact that every comet eventually burns up, disappears, and is over. Comets are amazing, but they burn so brightly that they destroy themselves as they literally crash down to Earth. The speaker begins the song with "One hand on this wily comet." The fact that he only has one hand on it, and that he doesn't so much as grasp it, which suggests possession, but rather is touching it, makes me think that he cannot control the comet, or the fleeting hope, or dream crashing to the ground...what have you. Wily suggests cunning, which makes me wonder if the comet is actively avoiding letting the speaker do more than put one hand on it. Something about the phrase "Take a drink" suggests alcohol to me, although it's not explicit in the song. I think it's because this idea of it giving him weight not only implies the physical weight of adding liquid to your body, but also some sort of mental or emotional weight and alcohol has a more direct effect on people's mental and emotional states.

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A Tool for Vocabulary
Quizlet Quizlet is my favorite tool for learning new vocabulary. It allows the student to make personalized flashcards of terms and then study them through various means. Quizlet also has a feature which allows the student to define a term inputted into the program by pulling information from other sets and sources. After the student creates a set of cards, they can study them by flipping through cards, listening and answering, or spelling out terms. The sets can all be saved to their accounts for future use. Additionally, a teacher could create a set of terms and give her students access so that they can study them or students can find sets made by other students in the past.

Choose Your Own Adventure Story
Business Trip Gone Wrong Blake, Kelsey, Kara, and I created our own Choose Your Own Adventure Story. In our story, the main character is a businessman whose plane to Australia crashes just offshore an unknown island. The goal is to survive the disaster and get rescued from the island. We used Google Sites to create the interactive story, with each decision made leading the reader to a new page on the website.

Video Trailer Project
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