KATE Conference Response

 What breakout sessions were most helpful to you as a future teacher?  What ideas are you going to incorporate into your teaching and/or planning?

The last session that I attended was about learning studios. It is a kind of classroom arrangement that focuses on movement and student involvement. The classroom layout makes use of chairs and tables on casters (for the sake of mobility), dual projectors and dual whiteboards. I liked this breakout session the most because the classroom arrangement sounds like it would be very useful and would go well with the teaching style that I hope to emulate. Even though it would be close to impossible to incorporate every idea the presenters talked about I think that some would be useful and easy to incorporate. 

The easiest would be attaching casters to the furniture so that they are easier to move, this would be good for group activities. I also think that I would like to include dual projectors in my classroom design. The presenters talked a little about the use of these, including showing side by side texts and pictures so that the students can see the differences between the two texts/images. They talked about paint that is used especially for projecting screens and I figured that this would be easy to get permission for, it could be easy to do and easily to undo if I changed classrooms.

Overall, I enjoyed the conference and learned a lot of new things during the breakout sessions. I would definitely attend next year's conference. 

Genre Reflection #1 - Regaining Control

The rest of the class sat silently, looking back and forth between the rogue student and the teacher.

            

“How do you know if we can’t do the assignment in two sentences?”

The teacher leaned back against the table at the front of the class, the podium with the assignment in question on it, stood at her right. The rest of the class sat at light grey desks grouped together in quartets around the room. Hands and papers masked their amusement at the interruption to their usually uneventful day.

           

“I’m not saying you can’t do the assignment in two sentences but I am just going to let you know that you are going to get a bad grade if you only write two sentences”, the teacher’s flat voice conveyed her exhaustion expertly.

The student stood among the desks, chest out and shoulders pushed back in a mock sense of confidence. He fed off of the hidden smiles and quiet snickers. The louder they became the taller he stood and the more the false sense of confidence moved towards justified confidence. Seeing this the teacher stood at her full height, moving towards the student causing the interruption. Speaking in her teacher voice the teacher announced, “This is not a discussion. The assignment is that you write a narrative story about a time when you learned a lesson. It has to be at least two pages in length, double spaced and typed. That’s it.”

           

“But why does it--”

            

“No. That’s it”, countered the teacher.

Smiles and snickers were immediately stifled by the tone of the teacher’s new found voice. With the silence the rogue student’s shoulders sagged, his chest caved, his legs buckled and he sank into the navy blue chair. The teacher finished passing out the rest of the assignment sheets and walked the perimeter of the classroom, squashing the lingerings of an uprising still brewing in the student’s minds. The teacher returned to the front of the classroom with her shoulders pushed back, her chest pushed triumphantly forward and her head held high.