The Conference Conumdrum

     I have just returned from Boston, left on Thursday after school and returned home Sunday night. The occasion was the National Conference of Social Studies (NCSS). If you've ever been to a large professional learning conference like this you probably know how overwhelming and amazing they can be at the same time. Hundreds of workshops to choose from and you have to narrow your choices down to the just four or five each day. Inevitably you will pick the wrong workshop to go to. One that is boring or just not really what you thought it would be based on the four line synopsis in your conference brochure. I seem to have the inate ability to pick the wrong workshop. Some call it a gift, I call it a curse. When I would leave my dull workshop session to confer with my colleagues and share my misery, they would make things even worse by regailing me with stories of the brilliant and entertaining speakers and information they had just sat in on in their last sessions. 

     Despite my inability to pick an interesting workshop to attend in these conferences, I still keep going back. Even in the worst or most boring of sessions I can usually find some nugget of understanding or enlightenment that I can take back to my classes and apply to my teaching or curriculum. It's these moments that make me glad I picked the teaching profession as my occupation. I can think of very few jobs that require the worker to constantly improve thier skills and knowledge. It is at these conferences that I'm pushed to think about my teaching, what I believe to best practice, and what I need to improve to be the best teacher possible. I know I will never win a teacher of year award and I will never know everything about teaching and the topics I teach. After 15 years of teaching I'm ok with that, I don't want to feel like everyday is the same, I want to challenged and pushed to learn more and do more. These conferences and workshops allow me to be intropective, inquistive, and at times even confused about how I should be doing my job. That's fine I wouldn't want it any other way.