My name is William Byland and I am going into my third year of teaching as a Secondary English teacher at Lincolnton High School and I run an iPod and technology teaching project and one of the only poetry clubs, with 33 members, in the state. My wife and I just had our first baby girl, Ella, three months ago, as we celebrated our 4th year of marriage and our 8th year as a couple, who met in high school and actually made it together into adulthood.
To look at my own literacy learnings and accomplishments, I think it pertinent to first look at where I work. As an English teacher at a low income school that serves some of the richest and poorest students in the state, complete with gang issues and news making incidents, I have had a great deal of experience with a voluminous range of literacies, from the top teirs to the lowest. To give a better example, I recently performed a rough literacy evaluation my smallest class of 26 students, only to find out their highest reading levels ranged from fourth grade to sixth. Also, my main job at the school is to teach writing skills, so I have also had a lot of varied experiences with that, teaching the most developed writers, down to the low exceptional children. All of this has lead to my current search for this degree in teaching literacy across the spectrum, and has greatly influenced my readings and writing.
My current tangent in reading has been books that proffer fourth ideas, lesson plans, and teaching philosophies that engage students at the lower levels and help build their abilities as both writers and engaged readers. I am focused on finding unique ways of looking at and teaching students that come from “difficult” backgrounds and struggle to find success even at their greatest attempts due to racial, abusive, cultural, or other issues.
Outside of professional readings, I read for enjoyment purposes novels such as The White Tiger, a novel of an Indian man who must choose between a life of limited servitude as a driver for a rich man in India or riches that would cost him everything including his family. Another excellent book I read just a week ago was The Road by Cormack McCarthy, which is a post apocalyptical book focusing on the realities of human nature.
I read everything I can get my hands on and more, and I write as often as possible; both serve to develop my literacy as well as my teaching career.