MCTE Conference

MCTE Conference

On Friday, October 5th, I had the privilege of attending my first of I hope many, MCTE Conferences. The keynote speaker was Kathleen Blake Yancey, someone who I have read and heard of for awhile. Her opening speech was one that gave encouragement for the rest of the conference, which I found disappointing. She started out by discussion literacy and what we feel literacy is. My colleagues and I came up with the three C’s; comprehension, confidence and creativity. This was a great way to get everyone talking and quit yawning. Her visuals were stimulating and very useful. She then had us discuss literacy in the 21st century, which includes technology and digital social networking.

This is huge to consider now. Myspace and Facebook are two huge networking programs that everyone I pretty much know have clicked onto. Hopefully within the next two years I will have a classroom of my own, and considering where we are now with technology and how it’s always growing, it is important to stay on top of these databases. This opening speech actually made me think about this class, English 4800, and how much technology we use in for it. It’s nice to have a class that keeps me up to date.

I then ventured to “Hanging on by your Fingernails until you Gain a Toehold: Advice for Future Teachers from New Teachers.” This session was a waste of my time; however, I saw the majority of my colleagues here, and it’s nice to know that us future educators have a support group. Everything that was discussed has been discussed to exhaustion in my Education classes. Having a supportive principal, good classroom and students, supportive parent’s, etc. This is all obvious. Also, the presenter wasn’t a new teacher, she just surveyed new teachers. During this session I thought to myself, “The people that are in this room are the ones that probably don’t need to be.”

I then headed for the LGTB Literature session. This session was also disappointing. The speakers did try; however, some guy kept standing up and talking about being supportive of the gay students in your class. I did receive an excellent list of LGTB novels.

The last session I went to was the one about poetry. Here, the speaker had excellent ideas about teaching poetry. Her ideas were very reader response oriented, which was interesting. She had us do activities which involved writing out own poems following the style and structure of other famous poems. It was interesting to see everyone getting into it, and made me have hope about teaching poetry using this method.