Teaching Tip #8

Teacherscribe’s Teaching Tip #8

How do you keep your passion up?

How to keep my passion up #4: conferences.  I can hear your eyes rolling.  I know.  I know. I know.  I used to think the same way, but not now.  Just last year I was able to attend both TIES and NCTE, and both events blew me away.  At TIES George Couros’ keynote was the best thing I saw all of last year.  That alone gave me enough passion to make it through the last half of the year on a high.  And that doesn’t even count the break out session of his that Kelly and I attended.  Even though a minor blizzard was looming, and it was late afternoon, I could have stayed in that room until midnight talking shop and exchanging ideas with the other teachers and administrators in there.

At NCTE I attended a session where a middle school English teacher – using Amazon – had his entire English class write, revise, edit, and publish their own novel.  How amazing is that?  I attended two other session on the multi-genre research paper, which I have taught for six years now, and it gave me fresh ideas and new energy to keep teaching it.  I attended a breakfast for first time attenders (along with Mariah).  When I began sharing the story of our transition 1:1 tech in our district, the first timers there from across the country were in awe.  That fired me up, let me tell you.