Bright Ideas Review

During her keynote speech, Jacqueline Woodson gave lots of advice to writers.  She suggests you should take it “bird by bird”, paragraph by paragraph when you are writing and not thinking about how much left you have to do.  She also discussed how with her poetry, she had to practicing reading it out loud until it sounded how she wanted it to. As teachers, it is our responsibility to value and teach students to value their own voice.  Jacqueline also believes that fear is not allowed when writing, whatever happens to come out, comes out and you need to make time to let writing happen.  She also touched on the theory that it is dangerous to ask yourself, “What is this about?” because it limits the story.  Instead, ask you should ask yourself or your writing students, “What is it trying to say?”  Her method is to have someone read it and tell you it’s good.  The next time the person reads it they will think of 3 questions to ask you about the story, then the third time, they can to tell you what’s wrong with the story.  Just going in to what is wrong with it would destroy it in the “embryonic stage.”  Finally, she suggested beginning writing with vignettes because they are less intimidating in class.

 

For the first session I went to “What does it mean to educate the 21^st century media consumer?”   In this presentation we learned about using Wikis, YouTube, and advertising in our classrooms.  It began with a discussion on how the news is now pop culture (i.e. The Daily Show, The Colbert Report) and anyone with the internet can report anything on Wikis or YouTube.  News media consumption has increased and there is more access to information not restricted by journalistic ethics.  However, media in an English class isn’t restricted to only journalism courses.  You can use news media with the curriculum, focusing on skills that would be taught anyways or reinforcing ones already taught.  Wikis can serve to teach students why online news sources may not be legitimate or relevant.  Everyone can contribute and you can’t trust the editing. YouTube allows students to question the “authority” voice and its motives for exclusion or inclusions.  This is good for showing perspectives on controversial topics that are skewed in media reliability.  As a teacher, I could use a novel that has a questionable authorial voice (i.e. Holden Caulfield) and compare it to the biased media.  Posters can also be used, such as looking at print ads then having students create their own posters.

 

The second conference I went to was “macBeth.”  The two teachers taught Macbeth and had their students connect them with something current. They made a really good point that texts aren’t sacred; they can be messed with. Some of the students created their own TV shows such as The Real World or Jerry Springer.  Other classes created MySpace pages for the characters in the story.  But since MySpace was not allowed on the school’s web server, the students used a template on PowerPoint. The teacher then linked the pages together, creating “friends lists.”

 

Overall, I learned some great things I can use in the classroom, regardless of what grade I end up teaching.  I am at the point where I am debating teaching high school or college.  I definitely would like to continue attending this conference and stay for more next year!