Saturday – Pittsburgh Update #2

The Pickle Barrel is where it’s at…if you live or are on the Southside of Pittsburgh and want a down home, local style, greasy diner breakfast. No more explanation is needed, that about says it all.

After breakfast Nancy and I walked to the convention center. This was just under 2 miles. It was a nice walk and a great time to take pictures. Because of the walk, we missed the first two morning sessions…which is okay, as it gave us time to see some of the city.


Workshops for Saturday included:
1) “Responding to Student Writing” which gave me some good ideas on positive responding and made very clear the different areas in which I can score or evaluate student writing (literary, grammar, style, structure, etc.). They also suggested a great technique which involves the student in their own evaluation process. I’m thinking I’ll try this out down the road.



2) A horrible session that ended up being a woman selling her book, I walked out and went to a grammar session that Nancy was in. Thank G-d for text messaging since Nancy informed me it was good. I went to the grammar session where Nancy and I got to participate and even do a skit in front of the group. How cheesy! We wrote a great sentence (so we thought). See English teachers do make mistakes. Oh well, I’m still working on the being perfect part.



3) Text Sets and Multiple Best Practices: Grapes of Wrath- This session had the potential to be great. It started off with some good info on solutions for problem readers, effective tools for instruction, and examples of themed books to use as part of a unit. However, the remainder of the session did not impress me. I was wanting hands on materials and tools on sample lessons, units, etc. Instead one of the woman spent 15 minutes teaching us how to fold a box out of paper. I kid you not!



Saturday Night we went to Station Square part of town, ate some dinner, walked around, watched cool dancing water where I got some awesome colorful pics. Later we walked over to the incline (a.k.a. funicular). Pittsburghians call them inclines. It’s a simple town  The neighborhood at the top was lovely and the best views of the city could be had up there. We decided to walk back to the hotel from there, which wasn’t far although a little creepy as the street we had to take was all industrial and very few pedestrians (it was almost midnight I think).