In my last post, I reflected on Friday at last week’s NCTE conference. I decided to split my conference reflection into three posts this year, so this post will focus on Saturday at the conference, and the next post will concern the conference’s final day.

The conference guide had a misprint that stated Jacqueline Woodson’s keynote began at 8:00, and even though the app was updated to reflect the accurate time of 9:00, I didn’t check it. I honestly can’t remember anymore how I spent that time. The exhibit hall wasn’t open yet, but people were lined up to enter it. Honest question: why? The exhibit hall will be there all day. What are people lining up in order to do?

Jacqueline Woodson’s keynote was great. I created a Storify of Twitter highlights.  I found Storify and Twitter to be a great way for me to take notes and capture highlights at this conference. I’ve used it before, but not extensively. Some important questions emerged for me from Woodson’s keynote: What can we do to make it easier for teachers of color to attend (and feel welcome) at this conference? The larger question: How can we encourage more people of color to become educators? Children need to see themselves reflected in their school faculty.

I have attended Tom Romano’s sessions for a few years now, and I went again this year. Each year he makes me more excited to do multigenre writing projects. This year, I picked up a few ideas I hope to be able to use with my freshmen when they do multigenre projects later this year. Romano remarked that he is noticing more of his college students have previously done multigenre work than in the past.

I didn’t go to a G session and opted instead for a yogurt lunch and for the exhibit hall, which was pretty much the only time I spent in the exhibits the whole weekend. I picked up the free Scholastic tote (my husband has a running joke about how many totes I have), and I bought Gareth Hinds’s new graphic novel of Poe’s short stories and asked him to sign it.

I attended my friend Jennifer Farnham’s session with Brooke Eisenbach, H.30 Creating an Environment of Social Justice in the English Classroom. Jennifer and Brooke hadn’t realized it would be a panel session and thought they would be at a large roundtable session, but you’d never have known it. We had time to discuss issues of censorship and social justice at our tables. It was an excellent session. Jennifer and Brooke shared some excellent tools.

Next, I attended I.20 Recapturing Assessment: Student Voices in Aiding Our Mission which was a roundtable session led by the #BoyTieBoys and their teacher Jason Augustowski. What an incredible session! Each of the Boy Tie Boys shared an Ignite-style presentation and then rotated to a new table. One big takeaway from their session is that we need to see more students at this conference. We can learn a lot from students themselves about what works with assessment and what doesn’t work. Some themes emerged from the boys’ presentations: students want choice about how they show their learning and they want to get to know their teachers in order to learn from them. I should add also that the Boy Tie Boys’ Twitter game was top notch. They captured some great ideas while attending keynotes and conference sessions.

My last Saturday session was J.37 Fake It ‘Til You Make It: Rhetoric in the Era of Fake News. I’d have been interested in this topic even if I was not friends with most of the panel of presenters, which included Deborah Appleman, Glenda Funk, Debbie Greco, Cherlyann Schmidt, and Ami Szerencse. The panel presentation focused on how to teach students how to think critically about the rhetoric they hear and how to evaluate news sources. It was a great session, and the entire panel generously shared materials and ideas.

I didn’t stay out very late on Saturday as I was nursing a cold and would be presenting and traveling the next day, but I did enjoy a brisk walk around the corner for some delicious pizza before I curled up for the night to read, transcribe some notes, and think.

On a completely unrelated note, I changed the theme of my blog again because it bothered me that visitors had to hunt around to figure out how to comment on posts. I hate anything that interferes with the user experience. I initially changed to a new theme because I discovered the one I used did not fill up the entire screen on devices with wider screens. I didn’t realize this problem because it filled up the screen on my old laptop. However, once I discovered it, it bothered me to no end, so I changed the theme. I never could adjust to the new theme. I tried to find other themes that would work, but I wasn’t happy with anything, so I finally sat down today and created a child theme based on the old theme I was using, which is Twenty Fourteen by WordPress. I think I have successfully made the changes I needed to so that the theme fills the screen, but let me know if you notice anything weird because I have never made a child theme before.