MCTE Conference

When I arrived at the Sheraton Hotel in Lansing, I was immediately interested in what this conference had to offer. It was well organized, and filled with plenty of sessions for each time fragment. Kathy Blake Yancey opened the conference with a "Keynote Address" which I found was the perfect beginning to a English conference day. She was clever, witty, and had great metaphors for introducing English literature into the conference. However, Kathy was only the tip of the iceberg.
I was most excited to go to the sessions that I thought would be most interesting, and useful for me as an educator. The first one I went to was the session that provided advice for future teachers from new teachers. Jill VanAntwerp hosted this session and described to us how she went about developing this specific session for us most adequately. She conducted a study of teachers asking them a series of questions. The response from those questions were then advice for the audience. Jill had two sections which were "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong". These two sections are responses from what new teachers have experienced as good things and bad things when they first began teaching. Some of the good things were, a nice room, great principal, wonderful mentor, great students, and a wonderful orientation. Some of the bad things were no room, no books, and no curriculum, which I found to be the most scary. Providing us as future educators, was a great preparation for what we may face in our first years as teachers.
The next session I thought would be most influential was teaching and implementing GLBT themes into the classroom community. I thought I needed to attend this session to get an idea of some approaches and books to read that have these types of themes. The two speakers, Susan Steffel and Laura Renzi-Keener, provided us with an Annotated Bibliography containing many novels and short stories dealing with homosexual themes for young adolescents. I appreciated this handout since many of them I have not heard of, although I may be interested in using in my classroom one day.
Overall, the conference was very influential and I believe it has made me feel less uneasy about stepping into the teaching world, and more excited than ever. It was a good experience that I feel anybody could learn to appreciate.