KATE Conference

Let me get this out of the way right away and say that I had a really good time at the KATE conference. It was great to meet a lot of interesting teachers and people from all over the state. I had the pleasure of getting to sit with one of our keynote speakers and the president (well, I forget what the official title is for the position). They were very nice to me, and understanding of how awkward it was for me to be sitting at what basically amounted to the "VIP" table for the opening festivities.

Jay Asher’s presentation about his book Thirteen Reasons Why was definitely the highlight of the entire conference for me. Jay reminded me a lot of what I envision I would be like if I had decided to pursue writing as a career. He has a dry whit to him that just seems so familiar. I can definitely ay he spoke a lot to the real experiences of what it is to be an aspiring writer and still balance that with an average life. He certainly hadn’t let any of his success go to his head. I feel that after watching his presentation, and to a lesser extent Clare Vanderpool’s, it has inspired me to not just give up on creative writing avenues and to continue to pursue them while teaching. Both of them spoke of how hard it an be to get work accepted, which really reminded me of things Ben has told me about his own work. However, they both kept trying and eventually the avenues opened up for them, so it is never a lost cause. This is probably the most valuable information they both shared for anyone aspiring to write.

In the other presentation I attended at he conference, it was important for me to check out the presentation on preventing plagiarism in the classroom. This is important to me right now because it has been a huge issue recently in my placement. We have been forced to openly hinder students being able to work on certain assignments at home in order to prevent them from plagiarizing any of their work. What I learned was that it is important to try and design writing assignments in a way that helps prevent being able to find any way to plagiaries the content. Making the questions pertain directly to the student in a personal manner was one of the biggest listed reasons. However, it isn’t always possible to make every writing assignment relate in that manner. I still found the presentation to be really informative, I just wish it could have also included some helpful ways to both identify and respond to instance of plagiarism. It would be nice to have a plan set in place for how the situation should be dealt with and be good enough to discourage it ever being done again.

Overall, the conference was good and the presentations were informative. I would definitely attend again in the future and check out some different types of presentations. I was a little disappointed that some of the presentations I would have liked to see were showing at the same time as each other. Because of this, it might be nice if some presenters actually had room to give their particular presentations more than one time a day so that people could fit them into their schedule.