The first day of the conference is now behind me, and all went remarkably smoothly. No Zoom catastrophes, no participant emergencies, and the curveball I tossed in my opening lesson was hit out of the park. That curveball was my complete switch-up in the way I introduced the year's featured Frost poem, "The Last Mowing." After dictating it aloud, I have generally stepped us straight into discussion questions, modeling how teachers can guide students into conversation around the materials of a poem rather than its meaning. Yesterday, however, I followed up the dictation by immediately giving participants a writing prompt triggered by a phrase in the poem. In other words, dictation and creation before analysis. My surprise move went really well: participants jumped directly into the emotional tenor of Frost's original, beginning to explore ideas, language, and sound that linked back to his, all without being told "We're now going to explore ideas, language, and sound as they relate to a Robert Frost poem." So I was pretty happy.