PCA/ACA

My little brother comes into town on Tuesday and I'm so excited! The bummer, of course, is that I will still have work to do, but so will he, I imagine.

He'll be in town until Sunday because we're both presenting at the PCA/ACA conference in Boston this year. He's presenting on, ummm, errr, I'm not sure. I think nuclear winter? All I know is that he has clips from Real Genius in his presentation -- that is if he can wrangle the technology. I'm avoiding the technology for this presentation, even though clips would be good. I just don't trust it, and when my presentation hinges on a few tv or movie clips and those don't work, well, then I'm screwed.

What's my presentation about? Using pop culture texts like t.v. and movies to teach writing skills. People often use them to write about, as writing prompts, but I want to talk about how they can be used as visual examples of writing skills themselves. I wrote a version of this presentation for a conference in Virginia that I didn't get to go to (the flight was cancelled) and figured I'd just recycle it, but I read it through and realized that it was fine for three years ago, but it needs some work for Boston. I've also done an in-house presentation on this at UNH. At this point, I could go off the cuff, but I'm not sure how long that would take. So I might just do notes instead of writing out a presentation. We'll see.

I'm presenting Thursday at 6:30, which is a little late for my presentation tastes, but it should be fine. I was presenting on Wednesday at a slightly better time, but got moved. That's actually a good thing because it means that I don't have to cancel class on Wednesday which ALSO means that Billy can watch me teach if he wants to. I'm actually enacting a part of my presentation in class on Wednesday: we'll be watching a clip of Field of Dreams and using that to talk about ethos, voice, and persuasion. Then they'll do a voice exercise that I really like and find useful. It's a good day to come watch I think.

Billy's presenting on Saturday, but I'm not sure when. He's under the "Law, Politics, and Culture" subheading. I imagine this is the only conference where we'll ever both be presenting. I can't imagine another one that would allow for nuclear winter AND composition pedagogy in the same convention. Totally cool. Love PCA/ACA.