Friday afternoon

I've never gone to one of these conventions without having at least one session be a waste of time. This time I gave up an hour of my life to discuss whether lessons addressed the "Tenets of Constructivism" and whether they "attended to the implications of the learning domains". An hour about vocabulary. A bunch of check lists. The people who led the class are smart people  run a university program in the summer that teaches constructivist methods. But this session had nothing to do with actually doing anything in the classroom. It should have been titled: "Are you a good Constructivist?"

The biggest problem with these annual ACT conferences for me is that there is virtually nothing here for secondary teachers. And especially nothing for secondary teachers in non-science or math areas. But the principals are still relevant for me and I often get good ideas from sessions that mostly concern elementary students. The 2:30 breakout today had nothing remotely connected to my work, so I went to  a session about playing with bubbles.
The idea is simple. Get kids playing, let them have fun, and they will be more open to learning the scientific principles that underlie the activity. You play with bubbles and at some point you ask the teacher, "why did Johnny's bubble break when I touched it, but mine didn't?" Which allows you to explain something about surface tension to them or some other concept. We also built ramps and rolled down marbles of various shapes and sizes, and we experimented with air pressure (blowing things through plastic tubing).
It was fun, but I finished without any good ideas for my practice, until we were cleaning up.
Then Gertrude Stein came to mind. Gertrude, who grew up two blocks from my home of 39 years, was the closest thing to a seven year old author. She loved to play with words as objects. She wrote nonsense poems, for instance, created purely for the sake of making interesting sounds; blowing bubbles with words.
When I get back I'm going to see if I can use some of her poems to inspire my students to be freer with words. Right now they are very constrained in their verbal expressions. Years of having their spelling and grammar red-penciled have induced in them a conservatism that frustrates me. If I'm going to break them out of this straight jacket I need a way to blow their minds. Gertrude might be the answer.

My old friends from East Tennessee University, a hotbed of constructivist pedagogy, led a session about "emergent curriculum". I didn't really understand most of it. I heard them say that we too often have a "deficit model" of student thinking. We try to deal with what they don't know instead of exploiting the intelligence they do have. Sounds good, and I think that is something I instinctively try to do (see my Gertrude Stein remarks above), but I couldn't follow the logic well enough to yield any good ideas for the moment. They gave me an article to read, which might help.
The general subject of the talk seemed to be about how researchers could lead teachers to rethink their practices by  more closely observing their interactions with students and by getting the teachers to dig deeper into the assumptions they bring to the classroom.
I have a couple article in my files about how teachers respond to student questions, how they dig behind the question to reveal the confusion that inspired it, something I'm not always good at. I need to find that article.

The Brooklyn skyline from the ferry returning from the conference.

We had a party after today's sessions. It was at a rooftop bar. The Empire State Building was less than seven blocks away.