On Friday I attended the virtual BCTELA conference at PSA Day! I was totally nerding out the whole time and it was so exciting to be surrounded by professionals who share my passion for the English Language Arts. It made me feel like a real teacher. I was joking to my boyfriend about how I’m basically a real teacher now because I get to attend a Pro-D day session and he made a joke about how I had the opposite of imposter syndrome.
The two workshops I decided to register for were “Moving Writers from Compliancy to Engagement” and “Exploring English Studies 12, Post Provincial”. The first workshop about writing totally blew my mind. I cannot believe I was completely engaged by this speaker for 3 hours. Kelly Gallagher is an amazing speaker and an amazing educator. I’ve never wanted to buy a book written by a teacher so bad (and of course they were sold out). He was also the keynote speaker of the conference, so I had the pleasure of listening to him initially speak about reading in the classroom and then have that followed up with writing. And man, he talked about everything I believe that should happen in an English classroom: ENGAGEMENT. Far too many times I have heard high school students say English is the worst subject, when it can be so fun! But the problem is they read things from a hundred years ago (Shakespeare is important, but so yesterday) and so nothing really relates to them. The list of books that Kelly provided that he was teaching in his classes was current and intriguing and had to do with real life issues. He showed us a clip of one student talking about the book he was reading and he said it had changed his life. How often do you hear a 16 year old say a book changed their life, much less a book in an English classroom?! Wow, mind blown.
I became oddly emotional watching some of the examples of writing exercises he gave us. There was definitely a point when I was in tears watching one particular video which is posted right below this chunk of text. Wow, once again, when was the last time you were brought to tears from a piece of writing?! Mind still blown.
During the writing workshop, Kelly got us to actually do a short writing exercise. He played us a spoken word poem and asked us to focus on one line or a few words and then to free write for 3 minutes. I haven’t done a free write in years. When I was a teenager, I was going to be a writer when I grew up. University and academics quickly bashed that out of me but damn, it felt so good to do that free writing exercise. I learned so many fun and unique writing exercises that I will most definitely be using in my future classroom and for my own personal writing.
I was also taken aback by the community that was created within these workshops and at the PSA day in general. In the chat during the workshops, many teachers were creating Facebook groups on the fly to invite people to compile all their resources on certain subjects. Many teachers were also connecting to create cross-country or cross-province book clubs (through Flip Grid! Hey, I know what that is now!!). Twitter was a big hit with lots of people live tweeting their experiences at PSA day. The community that these social media sites created was fantastic, and the community throughout the whole PSA day was so supportive and amazing. Some of the teachers even did a little shout out to all of the teacher candidates who joined! Super fun and extremely helpful to attend.
