oh, my god. Austin.
Wednesday:
Pretty cool and uneventful trip down. We left just after 10 and got in around 3; we missed traffic altogether and we had a nice lunch on the way. Once there, K and I registered and wandered around to some exhibits, and then had a nice dinner at the bar. Mine was medium-rare steak and spinach salad, balsamic vinaigrette and grilled onions and tomatoes. Fancy, though the margarita I'd been pining for all day were mostly sweet and sour. The hotel we're in is the Austin Airport Hilton, and it's round. There's apparently a whole military history surrounding it. The room is cozy and nice, and even though non-wireless broadband is $10 day.
(And this is where I stopped blogging on the fly; the rest is a set of reflections after the fact.)
Spent a good while sorting out the first two days of the conference. I had no idea just picking workshops would be so complicated.
Thursday:
8:30 AM, English on a Roll
The reason chose this one is that I have a set of English on a Roll cubes in my literacy room, but I have no instruction booklet. I am very glad I went because it's so much more than I thought it was. Linda Koran, the inventor, gave the workshop.
What you have is a set of 40 cubes, two of which are blank (and come with removable stickers so that you can create other word banks). The amazing thing is that on these cubes, most of them on one or two cubes alone, you can fit all of the verb conjugations (am, is, are, was, were, be) on one cube, and then basically you have a representation of most of the parts of speech and a manual of how to create every single verb tense in a sentence.
An example of what we did was to lay out a few cubes: the "be" cube, the subject pronoun cube, a collective noun cube, an article and maybe one other, and then you set an "anchor" cube -- for example, you might require that everyone use the preposition cube in the sentences they make the "be" cube the anchor. So that means when you turn the anchor cube, the rest of the sentence must be adjusted to fit the new phrasing. Therefore, if you make "I am a student" and the "be" cube is turned from "am" to "is," then you have to change the subject pronoun so that the tenses line up: "She is a student." An "are" change would require another shift in cubes, so that "We are (leave out the article) students." Or make it interrogative: "Are you (leave out the article) students?"
Gah. I don't know how she explained it so effectively when I suck at it so clearly, but the site is here. It was just an amazing workshop. We played a game, we did a timed test of how many different sentences we could make with five cubes, etc. And the cubes are in all caps, so there's minimal reversal or dyslexic confusion. This is definitely going to get used in my literacy class.
URL of note: interdys.org, the International Dyslexia Association.
10:15 AM: Math Tools for K-12/GED
Wow. This one was amazing, too. The speaker was a witty, sharp dude who taught us how to simplify things like equations in calculus and trigonometry by remembering that x and n are just glorified kindergarten symbols. Basically, it boils down to this: what's more intimidating? Cute, fuzzy farm animals or polynomials with radical exponents? I mean, come on.
But that's the premise, as juvenile as it sounds: Remember when you were adding doggies with doggies and piggies with piggies? Now it's d and p, instead -- or your doggie might look like x3+y2, but it's still a doggie. 7x3+y2 + 3x3+y2 = 10x3+y2 just the same as 7 doggies + 3 doggies = 10 doggies. It's just when you throw in a piggie like w3+z2 that you can't add them anymore; adding a doggie to the piggie pen isn't going to make the piggies more numerous.
It's okay. Laugh. I did.
That set me off on a whole tangent about reducing fractions or raising them to a common denominator, because that's the only time in math you get to turn the doggie (1/4) into a piggie (2/8) to make it mix with another set of piggies (3/8). I don't care how established the "this is a pizza" method is, I still have students whom it escapes entirely.
I don't know. I'm still working on that analogy, and it might or might not fly as a humorous method with my GED classes. I tell you what, though, my literacy class is going to learn fractions.
12:00 PM: Lunch. And it was a welcome thing indeed. I absolutely could have had a nap, and if K had not been there, I would have.
1:30 PM: Creative Instructional and Training Techniques
This one wasn't quite as wow, cool as the other ones, but it did reinforce a few things for me, namely that goal-setting is important in educational planning, even at the GED and literacy levels. Some of what I came away with were very useful in and of themselves, outside the workforce emphasis the presenters offered.
I liked the "parking lot," i.e. a board or sheet of paper, where students can tack notes, stickies or write their thoughts on what they need or want in the classroom. Sort of an educational graffiti board. This allows students to be communicative in a semi-anonymous or anonymous way without taking time out of class.
The presenters began with the question, "What did you want to be when you grew up?" (I said "writer," and I still want to be that, but they didn't hear me. It's okay. I'm used to being odd man out in the real world.) Naturally, we had the run of responses along the lines of "fireman," "ballerina," "policeman," "astronaut," etc., but then the presenters compared that list to the top ten jobs by need according to Texas Workforce, and four of the ten were educational, and three of the ten were computer/tech. With that information, I knew I had to dig a little at our own Workforce office (at which, coincidentally, K works) to find out what the needs are in my area.
The presenters compared education and skills with occupations. Those who excel at geometry might dig hairdressing, surveying, landscape architecture, or engineering. Algebra smarties might be chefs, chemists, pharmacists or teachers. Linguistic experts (English or otherwise, written or spoken) could be journalists, multilingual educators, or interpreters. Naturally, these are oversimplified; the fields are so huge that a lot of jobs get overlooked. Someone interested in aviation technology need not get anywhere near the pilot's chair; that person could be a mechanic, an electronics expert or an air traffic controller.
Then we got a rundown of stats. I already know education makes squat for money in spite of the fact that teachers are needed, and I mean everywhere, and I know that just about every other degree makes far more than a BA or BS in teaching. I mean, the next one up the totem pole isn't even close. The highest-paid teachers, and that's at the secondary level, make about $10-$20K less per year than the next higher "hot" field requiring a bachelor's degree, which is accounting/auditing. Adult educators, the lowest-paid, make an average of $25-27K per year, and accountants begin at $43K. That is assuming you work full-time, and I believe we have maybe 1-2% of adult ed teachers graced with actual full-time jobs. The rest of us are doing other things or scraping by with the hours we land. Keep in mind that a teacher at any level from K-12 must be certified, and that's another year or possibly two of college, with some emergency exceptions made for school districts in dire need.
Yes, I am perfectly aware that I Forrest Gumped my way into this job.
But save me from the "woe, I am underpaid" tangent. I love my job and I make better money doing this than I would just about anything else around here. Given that I have to add doggies and piggies for math to make sense, accounting is not in the cards for me.
Anyway. After all of this, we settled into groups and made paper airplanes. This was a "tapping student curiosity" exercise: what can we learn with airplanes? Ahem: math, charts and graphs, physics, geometry, following instructions, experimentation, measurement, teamwork, artistry and symmetry, and more esoteric concepts like wind velocity, arc and descent, weight/wind pressure adjustments, aerodynamics (or possibly hydrodynamics), etc., etc. -- and the methods were visual, tactile/kinesthetic and auditory. All of the learning sensory bases were covered. (Heck, I'd probably try to land airplane peanuts somehow, just for ambience. Did you know that you learn better while you're chewing? It's true.) In fact, the groups can be rearranged by task. K confided that she hates folding paper airplanes like this; she hates the diagram instructions and she has trouble following them. Bingo. She just became the group's statistician.
Remind me to come back to this later, when I'm talking about project-based lesson plans.
It was a very long, very...uh...long workshop. The upshot of it was "Here is what people want to be. Here is what they need to be, and here is what those needed jobs make. Your purpose as educator is to get your students where they want to go. Here is how you do that in a way that involves every student at every sensory level and will keep them engaged with the process of their own active learning."
Also, she spent a lot of time quoting Jim Brazell's Fifth World. I love a woman who knows her futurist speculation.
URL of note: hotchalk.com; free professional development resources and lesson plans.
Yeah. So, four and a half hours later...
5:00 PM: Dinner. Not just dinner, though. Awards. Not-good chicken. Passable rice. The restaurant at the Austin Airport Hilton was always great, but the chef must have taken the day off, and maybe they cooked the food in the dishwasher. God only knows. Awards, awards, awards. I am not dissing the awards. Some very fine teachers did very fine things and earned well-deserved recognition for those deeds. After a near-five-hour workshop, though, I really just wanted to veg. And I reserved the right to pick on M1 and K for fretting that they were going to miss "Grey's Anatomy," and on M2 for pining for "American Idol."
"She got voted off the island," was my response to both. "Oops, wrong pop-culture reference."
Friday, 8:30 AM: Differentiated Learning.
This was about teaching in a multilevel environment, which by golly, I do. My literacy class ranges from K-4 in reading, and my GED classes range from 6 or 8-12. Useful presentation this, right?
I wasn't awake. I plead the 5th, and it wasn't the fault of the little tiny bottles of wine from last night (and it sure wasn't "Grey's Anatomy." This particular piece of instruction was, my apologies to the presenter and any decent Catholics, as dry as a communion wafer. (Didn't Lent start that day, too? I slay me.) I needed to show up to the thing like J did, cup of coffee in hand. Or with caffeinated peppermints or something. Lots and lots of them. Frankly, going over the PowerPoints, I find I recall very little of the actual presentation with the exception of the notes I took. J was looking at the tail end of her booklet in horror at one point, and I whispered, "Yes, there's an awful lot of it to go."
So here are the notes I took:
--timer for classrm
--Bloom's Taxonomy
--Scope, method, plan, objective.
--proofread in reverse
--Set goals for class -- end lessons each class period (hey! I do remember that the purpose of this was to give a sense of completion at the end of class periods, rather than having lessons hanging there).
I am, apparently, a relatively lousy note-taker. How did I make it through college?
I swear I got more out of this, I just...can't remember what it was. The proofreading in reverse -- that is, proofing from the bottom without prior context clues to inform the process -- was a very good idea. Ditto a timer in the classroom (I am terrible about saying "Okay, you have ten minutes" and then losing track). And I suspect I had intended to let myself know that I need to brush up on the finer points of Bloom's. Everyone was on about Bloom's. I do remember learning about it, but I've slept since college. I don't think not recalling Bloom's makes me a bad teacher, but you know, as with being a writer, we always want to know more than we'll actually use, right?
About 2/3 into the PowerPoint packet, we realized with great relief that time was nearly up. She informed us that she would unfortunately be unable to cover the rest of the material as this particular workshop generally took six hours, which made us all cringe in terror. We didn't leave the board room, we fled the scene. The presenter was clearly knowledgeable and experienced, and I definitely had a sense of the fact that she understood her field fully, but something got lost in the translation. Or maybe it was the little bottles of wine.
10:15 AM: The Credential Project
This is so bloody exciting (insert Stimpy voice here) I can hardly contain myself! This is the method by which Texas is bringing a sort of self-maintained accountability to the adult educator. What it entails is an increased (vastly increased, though there's no time limit to it) amount of professional development hours, and the hours are translated to points based on how long the presentation is, from half-day workshops up to several-day conferences.
After these 'shops, cons, what have you, the educator then writes a reflection, guided by the program's expectations and what is essentially an outline of rules as to input -- sort of a speculative "this is what I thought of this workshop." Then, the educator applies the workshop techniques in the classroom for a time and writes another reflection: "this is how the technique rocked/sucked." All of this is then submitted via the web to the people who do the credential...ing.
After 150 hours of staff development and what amounts to tightly-planned blogging after the fact, you are credentialed. Pay raise? No -- not yet, anyway. New jobs? Maybe. Professional respect? Definitely, especially in the state of Texas. I just think it would be cool to be recognized for so much effort in the area of education.
I made it sound boring, didn't I? Oh well. You don't have to like it. I'm thrilled. K told me this would be right up my alley, as I'm already blogging my experiences, and I love professional development. I get something out of every single workshop I go to. Isn't that the point of a good career? Doing what you love -- and getting paid -- and getting recognized? Holy textbooks, Batman, that's a lot of icing on my cake.
TBC.