Maria's Mélange

(Karen Romano Young in conversation with Susannah Richards) I am continuing to share my experiences from Confratute! The first paragraph is the blurb I wrote for the newsletter. Below that is more detail from the amazing evening at the UConn bookstore.. Huge thanks also to Susannah Richards (@sussingoutbooks on Twitter and Instagram) for organizing this event.  Karen Romano Young visited Confratute on Monday to share some thoughts on writing for children and young adults. Her career began in teaching, but she realized that it wasn’t right for her very quickly when a few students played a prank in the school bathroom. Instead of being upset by this, Karen was amused by their creative genius. Her next stop was writing nonfiction for Scholastic News. This was perfect, because it allowed her to explore and write about the enormous variety of topics that interested her. Soon, she wanted to write longer work and began to write nonfiction books that mostly focused on science...

(Karen Romano Young in conversation with Susannah Richards) I am continuing to share my experiences from Confratute! The first paragraph is the blurb I wrote for the newsletter. Below that is more detail from the amazing evening at the UConn bookstore.. Huge thanks also to Susannah Richards (@sussingoutbooks on Twitter and Instagram) for organizing this event.  Karen Romano Young visited Confratute on Monday to share some thoughts on writing for children and young adults. Her career began in teaching, but she realized that it wasn’t right for her very quickly when a few students played a prank in the school bathroom. Instead of being upset by this, Karen was amused by their creative genius. Her next stop was writing nonfiction for Scholastic News. This was perfect, because it allowed her to explore and write about the enormous variety of topics that interested her. Soon, she wanted to write longer work and began to write nonfiction books that mostly focused on science...

(I wrote up summaries of the keynotes at Confratute 2016 for the daily newsletter. I'll be posting those summaries with more information about each presenter here on my blog. Confratute is a yearly, week long conference for educators interested in enrichment learning. Want more information? Visit http://confratute.uconn.edu/ ) Photo by Maria Selke - 2016 “I Won’t Mess With Your Comma If You Don’t Mess With My Decimal Point” Rachel McAnallen’s passion for math has been a lifelong endeavor. When she decided to pursue a graduate degree in math education, she didn’t let anything stop her. She went back to grad school at 70! Rachel works with students and teachers all over the world as she seeks to improve mathematical understanding and teaching practices. Rachel’s goal tonight was to help us understand how current instructional practices have caused many of the problems students have today. Most of these problems are tied into the fact that we don’t respect place va...