Every conference goer has experienced it. You’re sitting at a conference you’ve been excited to attend for several weeks. However, this particular session has turned out to be boring — something about how to use creative prompts to develop coherency in technical writing. Despite how dull it is, you are doing a fine job maintaining the role of engaged attendee. You lean forward in your chair, raise your eyebrows from time to time, and even nod along at obvious statements (things like, “Paraphrasing is a fine way to develop reading skills”).
Then the session comes to an end. A few people in the audience ask questions that were already answered in the presentation, and, just as you’re about to get some conference-blend coffee, the presenter provides you and everyone else with a list of resources — mostly websites, maybe some book titles. You politely jot down some URLs or take a handout and stuff it in your neon-blue sack, one specially designed by the conference staff since, apparently, no one in your field can afford a real bag to carry around stuff they’ll never use.
That information you’ve just collected is what I like to call the “resource bomb.” It comes either at the beginning or the end of a conference session, and it needs to stop. Please. Stop the bombing. It is simply ridiculous and nibbles at any dignity the conference attendee might have in his or her field.
No, I’m not against resources and knowing how to use them. I’m not saying it’s harmful to share good resources. In fact, many conference goers, including myself, use one or two of those resources to help keep the conference material alive for ourselves and our students.
However, let’s be honest. What typically happens to all of those pieces of paper, listing websites and book titles, from conference session after conference session? If they’re lucky, those lists get a quick glance before they are thrown in the trash can. Sure, they might file themselves chaotically under a pile of books for a while, or mingle with your children’s strange monster drawings. But eventually you know where those resource lists want to be: in that shiny cylindrical coffin where all good conference-handout intentions end.
And that’s fine. Their half-life is pretty small, and it doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good half-life.
But: People typically don’t attend a conference session to check out the handouts and resources available. That’s like going to a nightclub to check out the nachos or the peanuts.
We are attending your session because we want to hear what you have to say, see what you have done, or feel what you have felt when experimenting in your classroom. We’ve come to the conference to meet you. We’ve come to learn from you and learn from discussions with you and with other people who also want to talk with you. So please, don’t degrade your own creativity and original ideas with, “And here are the websites I was talking about. I use their lessons all the time because they are great.”
The problem is: The resource bomb never comes with any real judgments or rankings about which of these URLs and book titles are truly valuable.
Instead of a vague resource bomb at every conference session, I propose we exchange this information in a more valuable way — with a session devoted entirely to good resources in that group’s discipline. Panelists could focus on analyzing and evaluating various resources and categorizing them according to their quality and specific uses. Perhaps some conference somewhere already does this, but I’ve been to lots of conferences, and all I ever get is the generic resource bomb at session after session.
Serious teachers at all levels constantly change their courses — not because they are bored but because their subject is not dead. They must change if they want to teach effectively. Those who teach the same book and the same lesson in the same way, semester after semester, are saying that their field is static and barren. That’s horrible.
The resource bomb has the same effect. Without a critical discussion on these resources, people either use them haphazardly or don’t use them at all. Adopting some new website because it’s easy to use doesn’t create real change in your courses or improve your classroom.
Take, for example, a recent source I learned about, Newsela. That website allows you to adjust the reading level of news articles so that all students can effectively comment on the issue or event presented in the article. With it, I can help students better answer text-dependent and text-independent questions. But the site doesn’t force me to rethink how and why I ask such questions in the first place. It doesn’t force me to develop potentially better methods in improving comprehension and questioning. It allows me to keep practicing the same methods I’ve always practiced.
Some resources are great. Some are fine. Many are OK. Most stink and want to go in the shiny coffin. Let’s not permit an overreliance on, or zealousness for, resources to thwart our own creativity and experiments. So stop the bombing. Let’s consider sharing resources in a more coherent way and then making more serious changes to update our pedagogy.
