Keeslers Writing World

I went to the "Teaching the good stuff in the middle conference this last weekend. I really liked the two keynote speakers. The first one was a woman by the name of Linda Perlstein who wrote a book called Not Much Just Chillin: The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers. She studied middle schoolers and the things they do in and out of school in order to try and understand what is going on with them. Perlstein looked at the relationship that middleschool children have with their parents and why they don't understand each other. The middle school student has a lot of developing and changes going on during this time and parents don't understand what's going on with their children. She worked with many children and found that a lot of them use Myspace and other weblogs to get their thoughts and feelings out.
The second speaker was Anne King. Anne spoke more about the stages that middle school kids are going through. She had a great presentation and used a lot of humor to relate the information to everyone. King stressed the fact that middle schoolers is normal despite our often confusion with what they are going through. She also compared middle schoolers and the stages they go through to that of young infants and children in terms of their needs.
There were also three breakout sessions that I went to on various topics. The first breakout session was called "Normal is Only a Setting on a Washing Machine." This session featured Ms. Jacque Melin and discussed Differntion Strategies. Melin believe that it's important to assess students before teaching to discover what exactly they do know so that if a student has no experience with certain things, we as the teacher can help them out. Also this way we don't cover material that they already know. Most of Melin's presentation focused on different ways to mix students up so that they could help each other out and benefit from each others strengths and weaknesses. I think this is an awesome way to teach! I think that students should benefit from each other and learn from one another and not just the teacher.
The second breakout session that I went to was "Writing Across the Curriculum: Making It Work in the Real World." The presenters for this session were Kari Scheidel and Nancy Patterson. This session talked about how to use writing in all aspects of the curriculum in order to help students apply what they have learned. I really liked this session. I thought it was great that Scheidel had students writing and doing literature circles at a young age. Typically you don't see some of this until at least high school and I really thought that it's a great idea to start doing this early.
The last breakout session that I went to was a group discussion that was led by Tina Greene and Tim Reeves. This session was about ways to manage the middle school environment. Both speakers are vice principals and both have very different systems that they use. I really didn't enjoy this session as much as the others because it was more for people who were already teaching. I guess it did give me a few ideas, but I think it was far more useful to those who are already in the field and dealing with students.