NYSEC 2006

Listen to a podcast of this post, thanks to Talkr

OK, it would appear I am the last one to get on the trolley and make a post regarding our attendance at the NYSEC Conference in Albany this past week. I blame it on the fact that I needed three days to recover from the whole thing.

I attended three workshops during the day. If anyone thinks any of the information below sounds interesting, get in touch with me and I'll share the handouts I received and/or notes I took:

1.) "Words of Hope: Words for Hope" with Carol Jago (keynote speaker)

This session wasn't about what I thought it was going to be about. It ended up being about how to handle the workload that comes with grading hundreds of essays. She gave a lot of specific advice on how to keep your sanity when you collect a mountain of student writing and need to grade it all and return it within a reasonable amount of time, but also need to give detailed responses to the students.

2.) "Becoming a Grammar Detective Part II" with Cynthia Woodhouse of Sewanhaka CSD

At this session, I received a lot of tips for teaching students how to spot nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, et cetera. After watching kids totally butcher Mad Libs in the classroom where I observe, I think this information was very useful. It was a lot of good stuff, but it led to an unfortunate incident at lunch where I argued (erroneously) with James about the usage of close versus closely.

3.) "Teaching Graphic Novels" with Jennifer Roy, Mandy Dwight, Gina Palmer and Tim Rifenburg of Wappingers CSD

This session talked mostly about the ways to deconstruct the graphic novel form in Persepolis, but they also briefly discussed Maus. They discussed how to read a graphic novel, how to interpret drawings, et cetera.

Then came our session. I was a little concerned about being referred to as "an expert" in my genre, since I am not any expert by any means. However, after giving my little blurb at the opening of the session, I felt more confident speaking about science fiction and knew what I was going to say in my little seminars and was ready to answer any and all questions. The practice of having given seminars in Dr. Stearns' YA Lit classes over the past two semesters paid off, and I found I had much more to say about science fiction than I thought I did. It felt good, yet strange, to be (for all intents and purposes) educating these long-time teachers. But it was a success, as all five of my colleagues have stated on their blogs. It was a good time all around.

Now for the extra-curriculur activity:

Yes, James, Matt and I crashed a wine convention. Matt gives a nice detailed account of it, without giving away too many secrets. I will add that one of the funniest things that happened to me at the convention was when a vendor (from whom I'd sampled four wines) said to me "you know, you can spit that out if you want." I just nodded. I didn't sneak into a wine convention to spit into a bucket!

Being the geek I am, I did bring my laptop with me and tried to hook it up in my hotel room. No service. So I spent a half hour on Wednesday night on the phone with technical support (I'm pretty sure the guy wasn't from Bangalore, though -- sorry, Thomas Friedman) and ended up getting a new Ethernet cord from the front desk. Nothing worked. So, I ended up sitting in the hotel's community computer station at 1:00 AM, checking e-mail and making the rest of my daily Internet rounds. Nerd.

I tried to talk James and Jack into visiting Fairy Houses with me before we got back on the Thruway to head home. No dice.

Fairy houses or no, though, I had an excellent time. Who knew you could enjoy yourself at an English teacher conference? What a strange world!