Good Teaching Conference presenters instill love of reading and writing
02/17/2016
ISTA invited Mary B. Nicolini and Gabrielle Balkan, the mother-daughter duo presenting at the Good Teaching Conference, to write a guest blog previewing their presentation. Registration for the Good Teaching Conference March 4 – 5 is still open. Register today!
It’s one thing to teach other people’s children, but when you teach your own, you really need to be on top of your game! Mary B. Nicolini was fortunate to teach her daughter, Gabrielle Balkan, twice—as a sophomore and as a senior at Broad Ripple High School in the early 1990s. She’d like to say she was responsible for her daughter’s writing ability, but she remembers a conversation from Gabrielle’s first year at college, where she asked, “Why didn’t you teach me how to write?”
Balkan never had to hide under the blankets and use a flashlight to read books at night; both she and her mother frequently fell asleep with the overhead lights blazing as they read just one more chapter. The “clunk” the books made as they fell off their beds woke them up only occasionally. Nicolini remembers once when they were driving on vacation, probably to Cape Hatteras. Balkan, about a fourth grader, was in the back seat, sobbing as she read A Day No Pigs Would Die. “This is so good,” she cried, “why did you make me read this?”
Why, indeed? “We read,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “to know we are not alone.” Like her mother before her, Balkan grew up in an environment littered with print: daily newspapers, The New Yorker and National Geographic, overdue library books and paperbacks. It was inevitable that both their career choices would have to do with words.
In their interactive session, “Growing Up Literate: Finding the Story in Nonfiction,” Balkan and Nicolini will share strategies for encouraging writing and reading by drawing on their experiences both in the classroom and as writers. Through a blend of anecdotes and practical examples, they will discuss how creating classrooms of readers and writers is hard work, but possible.
Nicolini, a teacher at Penn High School in Mishawaka, will provide strategies for motivating adolescent writers, and Balkan, who lives in Brooklyn, will discuss her creative process, especially as it pertains to researching and writing non-fiction. Her book, The 50 States, taught her the importance of choosing content that both educates and entertains. For her current work in progress, a book about animal bones, she runs her ideas by her toughest critics--her 5-year-old twin daughters.
Participants in this session will gain methods for helping students jump-start writing and respond to text. Following the tenets of the National Writing Project, of which Nicolini is a co-director, teachers will engage in short writing bursts of their own.
And, even though she’s a little embarrassed to admit it, Nicolini is quite jealous of her daughter’s publishing success, as she would like to have a book of her own. Still, she takes pride at Gabrielle’s accomplishments, hoping a little bit of the interest was sown in a Rocket classroom.