Nerd Alert!

Last week was crazy! We had parent/teacher conferences on Wednesday and Thursday nights until 7 pm. Friday the entire English department went to a conference in SLC and at the last minute the weather decided it would start to snow, throwing all 5 of us female teachers in a tizzy (while the lonely male English teacher sat back and laughed and shook his head) and we decided we didn't want to chance driving out if it was going to snow all night and made the decision to drive out Thursday night after parent/teacher conferences. Luckily one of the teachers has the hook-up at the Marriot there. We didn't even leave town until almost 8pm that night because everyone had to go home after conferences and pack and arrange things for our families. Thankfully, I had already arranged for Brooke to spend the night at Honey's house or I would have been in BIG trouble.

Oh, but the conference was worth it! There were tons of vendors for teachers like Scholastic and Usborne Books and others who were giving away free products. I even won a free book and bought several others. We went to 3 breakout sessions and got to listen to 3 amazing keynote speakers. One was Neal Shustermen who is a fabulous YA author. He's written some great stories like: And(this one is a trillogy and the first book is going to be made into a movie.) I even got some of his book signed and this time I wasn't so selfish about my book signing. I got extra copies signed to give away in a raffle for my students and I also got a book signed for a certain nephew who lives in Alaska (Merry Christmas!). Neal Shusterman has also written a hilarious YA books called The Shwa was Here.

We also heard from Ally Condie. She talked a lot about her new book coming out Nov. 1

Some interesting things she said:

• if you are interested in writing yourself, if you write 219 words per day, at the end of a year, you would have a book that is almost 80,000 words long. Pretty cool!


• The rights to Matched (her first book in this trillogy) have been sold to Disney to make into a movie


• The scenery for Crossed is based on the scenery from Southern UT which is where she is from.


• Her brother Nick, appears in the book as a character named Vic and she said he turned out to be more of an important character than he had any right to be.


• The colors for the cover (Green, Blue, and the third one will be Red) are based on the colors of the pills the characters take in the book.

And because I am the biggest nerd ever, my favorite keynote speaker came from a guy named Jeff Anderson who spoke on editing. He had all of us laughing our heads off by telling nerdy English jokes. He talked about a book called The Shallows which explores the question: Is the internet making us stupid? He claims that by browsing through information we are teaching a generation not to pay attention to details and that explains why there are more traffic accidents and why students can't retain information. Very interesting. Basically, he summed it up with this picture:Jeff Anderson also talked about how Daily Oral Language (DOLs) where you have students come in and correct sentences written on the board that have errors in them (I'm sure you did this in school. I know I did and I know I have my students do this too) has no research to support that it actually improves student writing. As a teacher, I know this to be true. Anyway, his presentation was very inspiring thought provoking.

As a nerd, I was very satisfied.