Live at CATE: The Tech Wave Is About To Knock Us Over
It’s coming at us. Don’t you feel it? Even if you have buried a nice hole in the sand for your head, surely you feel the rumblings of the massive wave of technological innovations, or supposed innovations, about to hit classrooms. 21st century education. Blended learning. Flipped classrooms. About all of this, I am an agnostic. As a person who loves class discussion, writing and human intera
Live at CATE!
Things are heating up here—literally! It’s Valentine’s Day but who needs romance when you can cram into a tiny side room at a seminar with 40 or so English teachers at the California Association of Teachers of English convention in San Diego?
On the plus side, love may not be in the air (at least not for the four frazzled, middle-aged English teachers crammed into my row struggling to balance laptop, bagful of swag and handouts without elbowing each other) but it’s kind of awesome to look around a room and feel pretty sure that every single person you see has impeccable grammar. How often does that happen?
I’ve wanted to go to CATE for years and have never been able to pull it off. In palmier days, when schools had budgets devoted to anything other than bare survival, departments would often send their teachers to conferences where they could learn new techniques and learn from experts. By the time I hit the classroom, those days were over. And on a teacher’s salary, who could afford the $380 fee plus three nights at a hotel?
But since I’m taking the year off to learn, I treated myself and I’m here, blogging live from the conference right here at poolside at the charmingly un-hip Town and Country resort, a place chock-a-block with trellises, statues, fountains, palm trees and several million gazebos. My mom, a former English teacher, is with me; she left teaching in 1987 to become a psychologist. I’m extremely curious to hear her impressions of whether the