RIWP Conference

Going into the conference I wasn't expecting a lot, especially from the workshops. I remember going to Promising Practices my Sophomore year and the workshop I attended wasn't very interesting. But I really enjoyed both of the workshops yesterday, and I feel that I learned quite a lot from both of them.

The first workshop I attended was "What's Love Got to Do With It?": Revolutionize Your Relationships and Practice. In this workshop the teachers running it had us do a station rotation, which was fun but we didn't get a chance to go to all of the stations. The two I got to experience were lead by Ryan Burns and Ashlee Burns. Ashlee's station taught us about the importance of creating a personal classroom as well as forming relationships with her students. She told us how she uses Will Smith videos in her classroom, and I think prior to this I wouldn't have ever thought to do that. The other station I went to was run by Ryan Burns. We read The Sound of Genuine and then talked about the sound of genuine in ourselves. One quote from the passage that resonated with me was "you are the only you that has ever lived".

I especially enjoyed the second workshop I attended was called Finding Solace in Comics: Graphic Novels that Support Social Emotional Learning. One of the teacher's running this program was Micael Gianfrancesco, who also happens to be the teacher I will be doing observations with in my SED 407 class in the next few weeks. During this class we talked about including graphic novels in the curriculum as well as the importance of drawing and letting your students doodle. Personally I have never really been a fan of doodling, especially in notebooks or on worksheets because it ruins the aesthetic for me. I was a bit of a perfectionist with my notes in high school, and I felt that doodles would ruin them. However I do understand that it is important to let students doodle in their classes, Cara Bean, the other professional running the session, told us that when we are anxious we can lose between 13-20 IQ points. I found this session to be insightful, and already started drafting up lesson plan ideas on how I could include graphic novels in my future classroom.

I also enjoyed the key note speaker, Tina Cane. I appreciated that she shared her personal work with us, and also enjoyed the letter she had us write. I did not enjoy turning it into a poem though. Lately I feel like everyone is trying to force poetry writing onto me and it is taking the joy out of the activity. I hate feeling forced to do things, and I have continued to feel forced into writing poems, which is not something I enjoy or want to do. I don't like to do these things because then I end up in my head, and for anyone that knows me, they know I can't properly be alone with my thoughts or else I end up in a dark place mentally. I don't think it's okay for anyone to force someone to write when they don't want to, as it is leading me to really dislike writing and dread doing it.