Danielle Jago

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I'm Danielle! One of the first things I usually tell people is that I have moved around, because the first thing people usually ask is where I am from. I have lived in South Carolina, Oklahoma, Ohio, and North Carolina, but I currently live in Mauldin, South Carolina (which is super close to Greenville). I am a sophomore, and I transferred here from the University of North Carolina Asheville. I am a Secondary Ed. English major. Although I think I will likely teach high schoolers about cool classic novels, I am also interested in having a career dealing with educational policy making. In either circumstance, I specifically want to work with under served populations of students in an effort to create a more equitable educational experience.

Now, as far as books go I have quite a few favorites. Personally, I stopped reading around middle school for pleasure picked back up again about halfway through my junior year in high school. I transferred to a new school that year and had the best teacher ever for my AP Lang class. She is actually the inspiration behind me wanting to be an English teacher. Prior to her class, I read a few books that I loved like Elie Wiesel's Night (I also totally cried when he passed this summer, to be honest), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, George Orwell's Animal Farm, and Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo. Once I went through her class though, I had my head in a book all the time. Here is a list of my favorites: Orhan Pamuk's Snow, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Elie Wiesel's Night, Dawn, Day group of books, James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, and basically any Tennessee Williams play. Honestly, with the exception of a few books here and there, I have never been much into YA fiction. I enjoy the classics, but maybe this class will help me broaden that view!

Comments

  1. UnknownAugust 24, 2016 at 6:23 PM

    Danielle, I think it's so cool that you've lived all those places. For some odd reason I've always wanted to experience the life of moving around from place to place to different schools. My hometown is pretty small so I guess I kind of wanted to see some new faces at times! Never happened though until college if that counts. But I noticed that you said you want to teach high school, so my question to you is do you have a specific location that you would like to go back to and teach, or a new area in mind, being that you've got the taste of different school locations?

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  2. UnknownAugust 24, 2016 at 8:18 PM

    I agree with Keyona that it's cool that you have lived in those places. I have only lived in Chicago, Greenville, and Spartanburg so your more of a traveler than I am. I really like the fact that you want to have a career in the educational policy and want to take part in possibly making things better or fun for different institutions. I honestly admire your love for reading and I hope that one day my list will be as long as yours!

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  3. UnknownAugust 25, 2016 at 10:51 AM

    Thanks, guys! I would like to stay in this area and become a more settled human being for once in my life, but I am open to other experiences and opportunities outside of the Upstate!

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  4. kendall hendersonAugust 25, 2016 at 6:36 PM

    The Things They Carried totally made me cry. For some reason it just really made me emotional and it was so well-written. I just felt like I was feeling all the sadness and pain of every solider who's suffered in war. I guess that's why it's such a classic. I'm totally the opposite from you, though -- I've never been much into the classics but I've always loved YA. Thank God there are people like you out there, haha. I would make the worst teacher ever.

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