Some Special People

This year the I.R.A. convention was held in Chicago. That turned out to be especially fortuitous for the I.R.A. members from Illinois for two reasons: first of all, more of them could go to the convention because travel was less expensive; also, the Illinois Reading Council won five I.R.A. awards this year, so more Illinois members got to go to the awards ceremony to see the awards bestowed! Way to go, Illinois - you continue to be top-notch in your dedication to professional development! The I.R.A. convention will return to Chicago in 2012, and I'm sure the Illinois Reading Council will be big winners again!

The I.R.A. convention boasted some of the same speakers we will have in 2011: Jane Yolen, T.A.Barron, Diane Barone, Cindy Middendorf, and Frank Serafini were all there. (Honestly, check out Dr. Serafini's page - is there anything that man can't do?) I didn't get a chance to talk with Diane and Jane, but I did get to talk with both Frank and Tom for a bit. Whenever I'm in a position to speak with someone 'of greatness,' I feel like I shouldn't be taking up their time, but these two were awesome in their kindness! I had spoken with Jane Yolen last year at I.R.A. and Diane Barone this year at the Michigan Reading Association conference, and they were both wonderful as well. (I have not met Cindy Middendorf yet, but she's got a great first name!) It's always good to know we have nice people coming to our conference, isn't it?

Remember my last post? If not, scroll down and give it a skim - it refers to my cousin and his daughter, Sophia, who is giving us her 'librarian look' in the picture. Anyway, she woke up one morning and wrote a poem about a dragon about whom she had dreamt. So when I met T.A. Barron, who has a Merlin’s Dragon Trilogy, I wanted to show her poem to him. That’s what I’m holding in the picture here. I was going to ask him to sign it, but I had already asked him to sign two books for Sophia, and there were others in line, so I nixed that idea. Maybe another time, like next March, in Illinois!

That's What I'm Talking About!

Okay, now that the 2010 conference is over, I'll be adding to this blog about once a week. And what a wonderful conference we had in 2010! I hope you got a chance to go. Susan Cisna identified fabulous speakers to invite; as usual, the office staff did an amazing job of organizing and facilitating the conference; and the teachers, authors, and other professionals who led sessions were nothing short of remarkable.

For this blog, I have to share with you something that happened last week. It is predicated, unfortunately, on the passing of my legendary uncle, Richard "Uncle Buddy" Nitsche. He and my aunt and their children lived most of their lives in Lake Bluff, and a trip to their house was always fun for us as kids. Those trips were also punctuated by a drive through the beautiful Lake Forest, and also by Uncle Buddy's chuckles. That's what comes to mind immediately when I think of him: chuckles leaking out around the sides of his pipe. He was an amazing sailor and won repeated awards for his skills in the Regatta. So his passing prompted my brother Mike and I to make a quick drive to Collierville, Tennessee, where my aunt (his wife) and cousins Rick and Sue and Sue's husband now live. Other family members joined us, including my cousin Chris and his lovely wife, Mel, and their fifth-grade daughter Sophia.

Just a few days prior to this trip, I had made a goal for myself of reading every book that every author comingto the 2011 conference had written (with the possible exception of Jane Yolen - do you KNOW how many books she's written?) and I had just begun Patrick Carman's

The Dark Hills Divide. My brother and I had a chance to have Sophia in our car for a short drive to the coffee shop, and I asked the question I ask most kids: "So what are you reading these days?" She gave me a whole list of books to investigate, explaining to me how much she loves reading. Sophia is an adorable wisp with an adult vocabulary and logic that surpasses most people three times her age. I asked her if she had ever read Patrick Carman's The Dark Hills Divide, and her animated reply was that she and her family had listened to the audio book version during their drive from Savannah to the Memphis area! After some discussion about the characters (I was not far along enough in the book to know anything about her favorite character - the squirrel, Murphy, but she made me look forward to meeting him), we decided that it would be a good idea to take her picture with my copy of the traditional form of the book and her copy of the audio book - and she offered what she calls her 'librarian' look to top it off. Isn't she adorable?

Anyway, one part of next year's conference theme, "Literacy Outside the Box," refers to differing formats of 'reading' and 'writing.' Although Sophia and her family experienced what happened with Alexa and Bridewell through a different medium than I did, we still experienced the same story. I'm not advocating doing away with written text - rest assured of that - but there are different cognitive requirements for decoding through listening than there are through making visual contact with symbols on a page. We've known for a long time that the right listening skills can make a huge difference in what we 'get' from what we 'hear;' now that technology is expanding how much listening we do, do we need to identify those skills even more specifically? And what are some new ways in which we can utilize audio resources with our students? I'd love to see some conference proposals related to this topic.

And I'd love to find out what happens with Alexa in her next adventures in the land of Elyon, so I'm heading to the bookstore today!

Deadlines, and Speakers Outside the Box

Deadlines:

It's Saturday night, and I have spent the entire day writing and revising material for the Conference Preview. It is February 13, 2010, and this conference is scheduled for 13 months from now, but we advertise the upcoming conference at the current conference. That means the materials have to be done earlier than you might expect; they have to be sent to printing in time to be ready to distribute at the conference the year prior. My deadline for materials to be done and sent to printing is four days from now.

What's making it so difficult to meet these deadlines? Well, work, for one. I have a very demanding job, as most educators do, and it takes a lot of time. Another problem - and one that I hadn't anticipated - is that many authors and other featured speakers will not commit to a booking more than a year away from the event. Of course as you just read, we need to have them lined up earlier than that. And that conference preview is a great marketing tool for us, so it is best to have all of the big names in it. I've checked out the conference previews for the past three years, and they all have around 30 people's pictures and biographies in them: so far I have 15. I'm not overly worried about it: we can still get great people to come after the printing deadline, and add them to the Preliminary Program, and I can tell you all about them in this blog. But it would make me feel a little odd to be the one Vice President who had to go to a four page conference preview instead of an eight-pager!

Speakers Outside the Box

One of the practices we like to follow at IRC is to not discuss the next year's conference until the current year's conference is over. That way people won't get confused (and possibly let down) about when which speakers will be attending. By the time anyone discovers this blog and starts to read it, though, the 2010 conference will most likely be over, so I can go ahead and let you know right now about a few of the exciting speakers we will have scheduled for 2011. Should I tell you about them all right away? Nah. I won't. But I will tell you about one in particular tonight because I have discovered even more about him myself today and am even more excited that he will be joining us. His name is T.A. Barron, and he hails from Colorado. He writes mostly fantasy books for young adults - he has a series on Merlin and a trilogy on The Great Tree of Avalon. He says he has written most of life, but didn't get serious about trying to do it for a living until he was already the president of a company. He had a sort of epiphany one day and walked out of a board meeting to go be a writer. Cool, huh!

This year he is going to be a featured speaker at the International Reading Association's annual conference in Chicago at the end of April, and I am going to do my best to get to meet him and chat with him. But I already know what sets him apart from others and why he represents someone who is 'outside the box' on his own terms: he believes there is a hero in all of us, and that includes every kid. That feeling of the potential for heroism permeates his work. On top of that, he has created an award in honor of his mother, who was his hero. Every year, he gives out ten awards, the Barron Prize for Young Heroes, to young people who demonstrate heroic leadership in service projects. You can watch a short video in which T.A. and one of the recipients are interviewed here. I am looking forward to having someone with such a positive outlook about today's youth join us in 2011.

Literacy Outside the Box

Greetings, All!

The purpose of this blog will be to track the progress and development of the Illinois Reading Council's 2011 Annual Conference. I happen to be the Vice President, which means this conference is my responsibility. The conference theme - upon which I should have decided long ago - will be "Literacy Outside the Box." In the past, the other conference chairs have come up with their themes at least three months sooner than I did, but I have a problem, sometimes, with making decisions, when it is something that is a big deal like this. The possibilities are endless, and I really wanted to make sure the conference theme reflected the kind of conference I wanted to help develop.

Several months ago, the Executive Director came to my house to meet with me about getting started in all of this. She seemed surprised when I told her I wasn't worried about the planning of the conference, even though that is probably the biggest responsibility I'll have in the next four years. The reason I don't worry about it is that the organization itself, the Illinois Reading Council, is such a well-run organization of fabulous people - all volunteers except the four office staff - that I have every reason to have confidence that it will come off without a hitch.

My list of potential speakers was huge from the very beginning, and even though it was hard to winnow it down to what I felt was a workable, affordable group of authors and reading professionals, the only difficult thing about that process was deciding who should speak at which meals and who should be considered a 'featured speaker' instead of a 'meal speaker.'

The most difficult process by far has been landing on the theme.

The concept that I want to promote through this conference is that we need to expand what we consider 'literacy' and where it can be found; literacy exists in so many places other than just books, even though I almost duck my head in shame in saying that, since books have always been so important to me. We all know that there are different things to read these days: blogs, web sites, Facebook, Twitter, Wiki's, etc. Like it or not, those means of communication are a part of our world, and they aren't going away, unless it's to be replaced by something else more technologically slick. I thought about a couple of other ideas before landing on "Literacy Outside the Box." "Expanding the World of Literacy" was a possibility that I thought got across the idea, but when I envisioned the logo, all I could see was an exploding earth, and that just seemed a little violent. Then I thought about a puzzle theme, something along the lines of "Putting Together the Puzzle Pieces of Literacy," but it just felt like it would be more limiting than I wanted, since it would focus more on putting things together to create a whole, and I wanted people to be encouraged to think outside of the whole.

My intent is not to try to diminish the importance of good literature; rather, it is to help us all become even more aware of the literacy that exists in today's world. I want educators to think outside the box, especially at a time when they are forced more and more to try to compartmentalize teaching and learning and stick to almost script-like teaching; in other words, it seems that we are being asked to box ourselves in. Our schools are producing kids who don't like to read, for the most part, and it's not the fault of the teachers.

From what I've been told about blogs, one is supposed to take ownership and post what one wants - so this is my blog, and I get to post what I want in it. I guess that's why you see the particularly unattractive picture of me in this post - but I had just completed a hike up to Manoa Falls outside of Honolulu, and sweaty and disheveled as I was, I was happy to be in such a beautiful place.

It is my hope that this blog will serve three purposes: to let others know some of what goes on behind the scenes in developing a conference, to explain some of my crazy ideas about literacy, and to let readers know about the speakers who will be joining us for the conference. If you follow this blog for the next year, you should come to the Illinois Reading Council 2011 Conference feeling like you know the folks who will be speaking there and working there to get things ready for you.

Here we go, folks!