Walking into the Marriot on Thursday was kind of
intimidating as a student teacher. This conference would be full of English
teachers with a lot more experience than I have. I know I will gain experience
in the future, but right now I felt sort of out of place. Fortunately, checking
in and sitting down for breakfast with my fellow student teachers calmed my
nerves. Also, seeing many teachers I work with at North High School seemed to
validate that I belonged there.
The first breakout session I attended
was Mary Harrison’s, one of my fellow student teachers. She presented on how
authors inspire empathy in their audience. I have seen this presentation in its
infancy this summer during a class, but it was awesome to see how the other
teachers in the session enjoyed recalling the themes of the book used, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. The
audience of this session did not care that Mary was a student teacher; they
loved her idea about having the students try to guess who the narrator of the
book is. Hearing this brightened my spirit about attending this conference.
Of the two days, the session I most
enjoyed attending was the Music and Language Arts session presented by two
first year teachers. They presented different lessons they used with their
students that incorporated music in the language arts classroom. Out of the
session, I learned about defining and describing mood while listening to a
song. For my unit plan, I am using Into
the Woods and “The Most Dangerous Game” as reading material and I heard a
teacher say that the Jaw’s Theme song these two presenters modeled would be
great for “The Most Dangerous Game.” I am going to incorporate this example
into my plan.
When the schedule of sessions was
released, I was happy to see that among my colleagues who were presenting, many
of my teachers I worked with at North were presenting and even co-presidents of
the conference. From that, I knew I would not have any issues finding sessions I
would like to attend. But because of that, it was hard to choose because I wanted
to support all of my colleagues. It was also fun to converse with other
teachers across Kansas and find out how far they traveled to attend the
conference. At one time early in the day on Thursday, someone was talking to a
group of us and asked what schools we worked at, and we got excited because we
looked like teachers instead of student teachers.
I really enjoyed attending this
conference. Attending both days was a little much, but I received a large
amount of resources and ideas to take back and incorporate into my lessons.
