Literacy in "The Big Easy"

This week, I got to spend 4 lovely days learning about literacy in New Orleans at a reading conference.  If you know me at all, you know that I am pretty much obsessed with learning about teaching.  I've chronicled some of my PD adventures here, here, and here.  This conference was great, and I left with my brain practically exploding with all of the conformational and challenging things I learned.  I attended the conference with six literacy specialists from YES Prep, all of them lovely ladies.  We had a great time attending sessions during the day and eating wonderful food at night.  I found New Orleans in general to be not my cup of tea (surprising? no.)  But, there was some great learning and some great food, so overall, I think it was a success.

We ventured to the French Quarter one night.  Don't worry... I was back at the hotel by 10!  Here's Jenny and I before dinner.

Rebecca, my sweet roomie for the week!

Shrimp and grits at Mr. B's Bistro

I took almost half a notebook of notes!

Rockin' the teacher bags provided at the conference.  "You know you're a teacher if...."

When you're in New Orleans, I'm pretty sure you have to eat at one of Emeril's restaurants.  We ate at NOLA, and it was quite good.  The waiters got a kick out of us asking if they had met Emeril and if they are required to say "BAM!" when serving food to customers.

Stephanie, Simone, and Rebecca at NOLA

Jenny, me, and Wambui at NOLA

After dinner, we took a quick walk over to Cafe Du Monde.

Dessert of champions

I'm grateful to work with such wonderful people who love learning as much as I do!  Yay literacy!

Invasion of the English Teachers

If you happened to be in Chicago the week before Thanksgiving... I'm sorry.  If you were, you may have seen throngs of middle-aged women wearing seasonal sweater vests and wooden jewelry while dragging rolling crates full of books and correcting people's grammar.  No, you weren't in the midst of a mom convention.  You were in the midst of an English teachers convention!!!   If you have ever been knocked down by a zealous teacher carrying a 100 pound book bag, I apologize on the behalf of our profession.  Moving on.

Last week, thousands of English teachers descended upon Chicago for the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) Annual Convention.  Nerd alert!!  Nothing like four days full of learning and fighting crowds of educators!  This was my fourth convention, and I attended with my best buddies Emily Shisler and Jessica Cook.  Emily is my better half.  She manages high school English across YES Prep, and I manage middle school English.  High schoolers intimidate me.  Little kids terrify her.  So, we're a match made in heaven.  She and I are equally nerdy and love to learn about English, so she makes a good convention partner.  Jess teaches high school English at NC, and she completes the group with her similar nerdy desire to learn and her dry humor that keeps us laughing.  I had the BEST time with both of them.  As an added bonus, Emily grew up in Chicago and went to college at Northwestern.  Neither Jess nor I had ever been to the city, so Emily acted as our tour guide and made sure that in between sessions we ate the best food Chicago had to offer and saw all of the sights.

We stayed at the Palmer House which was pretty ordinary in terms of hotel rooms, but the lobby was impressive.  The beautiful hand-painted ceiling and ornate furnishings made it a really cool place to hang out...  except for the fact that there were approximately one thousand teachers there every night drinking after a long day of learning.  Yikes!

Of course we walked through Millennium Park and took pictures at the bean.  Here is Emily acting as our tour guide and telling us the notable features of many Chicago buildings.

I just wanted to show off my new hat complete with a pom-pom and mittens complete with tassels.  Thanks, H&M.

We went to the 95th floor of the Hancock Tower, the Signature Lounge, at exactly the right moment.  The sun was setting, there was a free table by the window, and they served excellent cosmos.  Yes, please.  We hadn't been to a single convention session yet, but we still needed a cosmo.  Obviously.

There's the tour guide again, getting in the way of my beautiful picture (just kidding!)

Looking down the lake shore towards Northwestern, Emily's alma mater.

I think this looks like a honeymoon in Hawaii picture with the sunset.  Don't you? 

Here's my honeymoon pic with Emily.

After drinks, we headed to eat (what else?) deep dish pizza.  It didn't disappoint.  We ate half of the pizza before thinking to take a picture if that tells you anything.

The next day we had a 45 minute break for lunch in between sessions, so we hopped in a cab per Emily's suggestion and headed towards Portillo's for some Italian beef and/or Chicago hot dogs.  We all opted for the Italian beef, and we weren't sorry.  Until about an hour later when we wanted to nap instead of learn.  But that's beside the point.

The second night we got to have dinner with my very bestest long-lost YES Prep friend Lora Knapp.  She was my team teacher back in the day (good times), and now she lives a high powered life in Chicago recruiting for TFA and living in a chic high rise.  We had a great time catching up! 

I PROMISE that we really did go to sessions, and I really did learn a lot about teaching and supporting teachers and ideas for PD and all that jazz.  Promise.  It's just not really exciting to post pictures of a ballroom full of teachers watching a power point.  If you're interested, email me and we'll chat.  :-)  Heads up.... next year NCTE is in VEGAS!!!!  Clear the way for rolling crates in the casinos, 'cause we're comin' with thousands of our best teacher friends!  Teachers in Vegas.... wow.  That should be incentive enough to follow my blog for another year so you can see what happens....  I'll report it faithfully.

The Fightin' Texas Aggie Class of 2020!

On Friday, we took all 155 of our little seventh graders to A&M for a day trip! It was really fun even though it was FREEZING! According to my calculations, if our 7th graders attend Texas A&M, they will be proud members of the class of 2020! Crazy!!

We wanted our seventh graders to see what a college looks like and get an idea of what it might be like to attend college. We talk about college all the time, but sometimes I don't think it sinks in. When you're 12, it's hard to think that far ahead, especially if you've never seen a college campus in your life and/or no one in your family has ever gone to college. We want them to work hard in seventh grade in preparation for college, and we want them to desire to go to college, which is harder than it sounds. I hope that their trip yesterday impacted them in some way and that at least a few will go to A&M! We have several teachers on our team who, after visiting, actually said they WISHED they had gone to A&M. Brings a tear to my eye! Here were the cutest quotes of the day:

"Miss, do they have free dress day everyday?? Because they are not wearing uniforms, and someone was wearing pajamas."

"This dorm looks like a HOTEL!"

"You all are making it too hard for me. Now I want to go to Georgetown and UT and A&M!"

"Well, I would want to be an en-gi-a-neer. Because they get to fix cars. Or maybe a Marine. Because they get to use guns."

Here we are on our campus tour. Our school's mascot, Toby the Trailblazer, came along with us and got his picture taken with E. King Gill.

Me with some of my girls, Andrea, Brittney, and Alejandra in front of the Academic Building with old Sul Ross
Listening to our tour guide on the Military Walk
Having class in a real classroom with a real professor! It was so cute. This was the classroom where I took INFO 210!!! Weird to be back eight years later with my students!

Lots of them said that the class was their favorite part. I mean, whatever works!

Here is my little "bestie". This is Amanda, and I love her. She's hanging out with me in seventh grade for a second year, and she likes to act like she doesn't like me. But she secretly does, and she's one of my faves. She's doing much better this year!

Yay for brainwashing the young people early with Aggie traditions!!

Book Bonanza

Is is possible to drown in books? Or maybe to be knocked unconscious by an avalanche of falling books? If so, I might be in danger. I'm a librarian, an English teacher, and a reading specialist, so it makes good sense that I have a lot of books in my life. But this week I realized just how much my life revolves around books. I'd call it a book bonanza for sure. My arms have gotten quite toned from hauling stacks and stacks and boxes and boxes of books around! Everyone should be so lucky! Take a look:

Let's start at home. Here's my bedside table. Sometimes I don't even have room for my nightly glass of water.

Here's my desk at school. Most people probably have a few books on their desk. I have EIGHT (count 'em) STACKS of books on and around my desk!!

This week was our Scholastic Book Fair. So in addition to managing the library, I was running this bad boy. It was like a book cave! I also felt quite like I worked at Barnes & Noble all week.

One library is CLEARLY not enough, so here is my classroom library with about 600 books.

...aaaaand here are the, oh, 15 boxes full of books waiting to be entered into the library.

I mean... seriously?!

So as you can see, I am surrounded by books pretty much ALL.THE.TIME. And usually, I love it :-) This week with the book fair and all the books I've been entering into the library, I've been on a book high. I keep pulling books and setting them aside because I want to read them. I've got a towering stack that I seriously can not WAIT to read. Good thing Thanksgiving break is coming up. I've been trying to work hard today to get things done so I can have lots of reading time this weekend. I'm still reading "Bright Young Things" (see previous post), but as soon as I finish, I'm going to tackle these little lovelies. I've posted them in order from little kid to big kid.

Book club, anyone?????

"Candymakers" by Wendy Mass caught my eye right away in Barnes and Noble last week. Quick: What does this book remind you of?

Willy Wonka, right?? I can't believe how similar it is. It looks like pure fun. I've read two other books by Wendy Mass that I LOVED: "A Mango Shaped Space" and "Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life," so I'm sure this will be equally as good.

How fun does this look? It's a mystery / treasure hunt book where you as the reader have to solve all kinds of puzzles while you're reading.

At first glance, this book isn't my type, but it has won some awards, and I've seen it on lots of lists lately. It's a monster book about a kid who watches Food Network all the time and wants to be a chef.

"Return to Sender" intrigues me because I think it will be one I can recommend to my kids. It's about a boy whose family hires illegal immigrants to work on their farm. He becomes friends with one of the immigrants, and the story tells of the complex moral and personal issues that arise. It won the Pura Belpre Award for Hispanic American literature. This book's cover just grabs you, right? This book is described as "an opulent, surreal world of strange beauty, sudden horror, and lush romance". Sounds good to me!

I've read several Libba Bray books - most notably her "Great and Terrible Beauty" series. This one is definitely for a high school audience. Booklist calls it: "an unforgettable, indefinable fantasy adventure." As I'm reading about it, I can't really explain what it's about either. Something about mad cow disease and hallucinations... who knows. But I'm pretty sure it will be good. It won the Printz award.

I might be the only person who hasn't read "The Help" yet. Everyone from my mother-in-law to my colleagues have urged me to read it. I'm getting to it! Looks and sounds amazing.

Also, I may be the only person ever to have not read this. I came across it in the library the other day and was intrigued by this classic novel set in turn of the century Brooklyn. As you can see on the cover, the NY public library selected it as a "book of the century"!

Whew. That's a lot. I have a sickness. And, I know I've got others I want to read soon, too! Two more just popped in my head, but this post is already long enough. Got to save some books for next time!

What do YOU want to read? ...and do you want to come help me organize books? :-)