Room 214

Hello readers,

I am currently working at an advertising agency in San Francisco, California. As part of this work, I am learning more about Blurb, a company in San Francisco that helps creative people make high-quality books for a good price. One teacher in San Francisco used Blurb to motivate her students:


Storytelling Series: "Room 217" by Rebecca Kee from Blurb Books on Vimeo.

As a former writing teacher, I really like this idea. Students are more motivated when they feel like they are doing something real, with real-life benefits. As you can see from the video, this is true even when the students are small children.

Do you think you will become a teacher? If you do, how will you motivate students to write?

an article about me

Here is an article about me by my hometown newspaper:

Yuman's teaching experience leads to personal growth
By Sarah Wormer
Yuma Daily Sun, January 4th, 2011

Personal growth takes place when you are able to step out of your comfort zone and pursue the unknown. 

That is exactly what Yuma High School alumnus Adam Flynn did when he left town in September of 2008 to live in Cambodia and work as an English and American history teacher at the Royal University of Phnom Penh.

After graduating from Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in history, Flynn applied to work with the Princeton-in-Asia program, which provides graduates with the opportunity to serve the needs of the people of Asia.

Initially he was planning to only stay for a year, but after a brief visit home in the summer of 2009, he later decided to extend his stay in Cambodia until July of 2010.

He explained that he realized he wasn't done with the country yet and there was still more that he wanted to do.

Flynn explained that he decided to enter the program because he wanted to broaden his mind and make an impact in people's lives. Through his time overseas, he said that he grew a tremendous amount and was inspired personally by the experience. 

“When traveling, you place yourself in all these sort of strange situations, you learn things about yourself that you wouldn't normally learn otherwise. If you sort of spend your time entirely in your comfort zone, then it's hard to grow,” he said in a previous article of the Yuma Sun.

During his time in Cambodia he found that while the country was gradually improving its women's rights issues and slowly moving toward a democracy, it still had a long way to go in terms of development.

“It was a fascinating place to be for two years,” said Flynn.

He noted that the students that he worked with were from rural areas and at the university on scholarships. Most students, he said, were living on $20 or less a month.

“Every day they pushed and worked,” he said about the majority of his students.

Flynn said that he hopes that he was able to touch the lives of students he worked with so that they would in turn touch the lives of others around them.

“One good day of class could spread out like ripples in a pond and have effects that you may never realize,” he said.

He explained that learning the English language was a huge asset for Cambodians because it would help them advance themselves.

“You will have a lot of people who want to learn, and for them, learning English will significantly better their lives because they have the tourism and they have the businesses. There if you know a scrap of English you have a step up on so many other people,” he said.

While in Cambodia, he realized that there are so many things that Americans take for granted, like having access to toilets and the fact that the police in the United States work at night, where they generally don't in Cambodia.

Unfortunately, during his second year in the area all of his electronics were stolen, including his computer and iPod. Flynn said that the police were no help in recovering the items.

He added that the country had great laws on the books but it was the enforcement and the way the courts interpret the laws that were the problem.

In the future, Flynn plans to move to San Francisco, Calif., to work at an internship with an advertising agency that deals with research, insight and account planning.

He said that his experience studying history in college and learning about another culture will help him to better understand the different ways that people live, think and see things.

“It's a strange new world and I would love to try and figure out what makes it go,” he concluded.

Visit www.princeton.edu/~pia/ for more information on the Princeton-in-Asia program.

Sarah Womer can be reached at swomer@yumasun.com or 539-6858.

What to do with a wild elephant?

Today, I read about the raging elephant in Kampong Speu province, and thought about how for all our modern lifestyles, it is still difficult to stop an angry elephant. It also reminded me of a famous essay by George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984. He was a police officer for the British Colonial Government in Burma (Myanmar today), and was once forced to shoot an elephant with a powerful rifle. But why did he shoot the elephant? Read the story below to find out:

Questions to think about:
*Have you ever been in charge of something? How did that change the way you acted?
*Have you ever been afraid of being embarassed? How did it change the way you acted?
*What do you think life was like for Cambodian people under the French Colonial Government?
*What do you think life was like for the French people who worked in the Colonial Government?

Click the link below to read the story.

A Good Video: How to Write a Research Paper

Earlier, I explained some basics of how to do research. Once you have done your research, however, you need to write it up into a paper. Here is a helpful video that explains one easy method of writing a research paper, journal article, or thesis:



Thanks to Simon Lindgren, maker of the video.

a recommendation

I try to keep in touch with my former students, or at least the ones who were interested in learning. Panharath, one of my former students, has his own blog. He has a unique writing style, born from his command of English vocabulary and structures, and willingness to use them in any situation. I encourage you to read his short story about a family that comes to Phnom Penh for the Water Festival, and gets caught in the terrible stampede on Koh Pich:

...the excitement grew stronger as the parents had been told about the newly built playground at a park near the riverside and mostly thrillingly, the fanciest venue available to everyone, the country’s renounced Koh Pich (Diamond Island). The expectation for Om Tuk this year then got even higher, and the anticipation of seeing the new places is overwhelming... 

--From  "The Festival of Fun and Fatal Fiasco"

self education and reading

I believe strongly in the power of self-education. When you learn about something interesting on your own, it is far stronger than something you are forced to learn by a teacher. While it is true that you cannot learn everything by yourself, there will come a time when you finish school. When that time comes, it is your decision whether you will continue learning, or start forgetting.

Richard Wright's non-fiction story "The Library Card," is taken from Black Boy, a book about his own life experiences growing up as an African-American (also called "blacks" or "Negroes") in the southern part of the United States during the 1920s-30s. At that time, whites in the south had a cruel system of power over the blacks (the "Jim Crow" system), took away the rights of black people, and tried to keep them from learning anything. In order to read, Wright had to pretend that the books he was getting from the library were for a white worker. 

He describes the effect when he began reading the books of H.L. Mencken: 

That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority. What was this? I stood up, trying to realize what reality lay behind the meaning of the words . . . Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons?

[...] I ran across many words whose meanings I did not know, and I either looked them up in a dictionary or, before I had a chance to do that, encountered the word in a context that made its meaning clear. But what strange world was this? I concluded the book with the conviction that I had somehow overlooked something terribly important in life. I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

This is the power of great literature: to give you experience outside of your own life, to find new ways of looking at the world. Novels are "fiction," yes, but you can still learn a lot from them; they help you develop your personal view of the world. In the case of Richard Wright, they helped him open a window outside his own narrow life, and caused him to become a writer.

What do you read and why?

a helpful link

I apologize for not updating recently. I am studying for the GREs and applying to graduate schools for Master's programs. The GRE tests your abilities with both language and mathematics, as well as writing. If you are looking for an interesting topic to write or think about, try checking out this list of analytical writing topics. Some of them may be difficult to understand, but many of them are very interesting. Here are a few examples:

"Education should be equally devoted to enriching the personal lives of students and to training students to be productive workers."

"Success in any realm of life comes more often from taking chances or risks than from careful and cautious planning."

"It is not the headline-making political events but the seldom-reported social tranformations that have the most lasting significance."

"The best preparation for life or a career is not learning to be competitive, but learning to be cooperative."

What do you think about these ideas?