 I'll take away and use my students with the carousel or the idea of found poetry. I've seen this in a lot of the academic articles that I've read but never thought to use it with my students or in my own writing. So I'm excited to start that this week. Since I'm not in the class room anymore as a teacher, I do previous. I'm thinking that some of the information or knowledge I gained from this front row is something I can share with teachers. We don't have part of this protocol and I think it might be very helpful. I like the way this presents a very problematized curriculum to challenge students to sing out of the box. I'm really excited to be here and see what everyone else is doing. I just love the writing project because I can get all these ideas. I can bring it to my classroom the next day and even just being part of the summer since I've already used so many things in the summer, I'm like, the classroom is going to be such a huge difference to me. I just love the writing project. It's an opportunity for tenancy to energize me or re-energize me. We all get caught up, like in my programming, caught up sometimes in fundamentals and trying to make sure that I convey certain things. I fall into a bit of a routine. Here I come, I get inspired by the instructors but I also really get inspired by the other teachers and how they share their ideas. I think the program is fantastic. This is my second go-round and I've loved every minute of it so I appreciate what Smash Riders is doing. I'm here at Amherst Regional Middle School where she's also served as a foreign language teacher and as assistant principal. She exemplifies the writing project idea of teacher as writer. She has a wonderful blog called Maestra Teacher, which I've lurk on occasionally, and she has recently co-written a book with her mom, the uninvited who is here as our guest today, called Teaching a Life's Work, A Mother-Daughter Dialogue, which will be published in January by Teachers College Press. I'm really looking forward to that. Alicia is also an advocate for social justice and she was honored in 2015 by the Massachusetts Teachers Association with its Louise Gaskin's Lifetime Civil Rights Award. Thank you Bruce and everybody on the Western Mass Writing Project Executive Board for this honor. It really is an honor coming from my professional home, which as a teacher it's the place I always go to for resources, for ideas, for encouragement, and I really feel like it's a big part of why I've stayed in teaching. And this is my 24th year as a teacher. So thank you very much. I also want to thank my mom who's here, as you know. My mom has been my inspiration forever as a teacher herself and writer. It's just been such a pleasure to write a book with her. I mean how many people could get to write a book with their mom. It's been a very special time for me. And thank you for always being my biggest fan. Thank you at the Writing Project for just being such a big support. I think if not for those two summers that I did teachers as writers, that little week in the summer to write and in my own writing part of my summer institute, I don't know if I would have really immersed myself enough in writing to complete this project. So I'm forever grateful into the Writing Project. So I was thinking about the theme when I first got versus email and I went on YouTube and watched the video of the song. I don't know if anybody else did that. But the link I went to, the song was translated into Spanish. And I thought that's somehow really appropriate for voice and identity and respectful dialogue. And I was thinking that in that we are called upon to be translators, kind of cultural translators. When we bring literature into the classroom for our kids from a different perspective, we're translating for them something they can't necessarily see. And when we help them write about their own experiences for communication with the world, we're helping them to translate.