Skip to main content

#NSTA17

For almost as long I have been teaching I have wanted to go to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) national conference. Finally, I've made it!! Every year I asked to go and every year I was told the school didn't have the money to send me. Fast forward to 2017. Thanks to a grant from Math for America and a generous principal that supports my professional growth, I have made it to my first NSTA national conference. Woo Hoo!!!

Day 1 - I arrive in Los Angeles
It's March and I live in New Jersey. So, it's cold. Two weeks ago we had a major snow storm. Cue the California sunshine. As soon as I stepped out of the airport terminal in LA I began to peel off the layers and whipped out the sunglasses. Sandal season is on! After arriving at the hotel I was able to sit outside and get some work done. In March. So nice....After that, an unexpected dinner with a friend and then off to the conference.

 Tomorrow is the first official day of the conference but tonight there was a special event - a talk by Bill Nye thanks to the Planetary Society. Bill freakin' Nye!! Science teachers love them some Bill Nye. And the guy is funny. Smart and funny. Can't get much better than that. I am eternally grateful to the man for bringing science into pop culture. Mr. Wizard, Bill Nye, Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson - all of them instrumental in bringing science literacy to the world. I get to 150 kids a year. They get to millions.
Bill Nye!!

Now it's back in the hotel room as jet lag catches up to me. It's way past my bed time (east coast time). Can't wait to see what tomorrow brings.

Day 2: An exciting and exhausting day
Jet lag woke me up at 5am this morning. I tried hard to go back to sleep but to no avail. Finally worked my way down to the healthiest breakfast buffet I have ever seen (way to go California) and then over to the conference center. My first session was at 8am. Four sessions then lunch. Four more after lunch. Over to the exhibit hall to learn about some amazing products and opportunities and I picked up lots of swag. Thank goodness I took the bigger suitcase. I'm still working out how I'm going to get the posters home.
 
Doing Some Gel Electrophoresis 

Here are some of the day’s highlights:
NOAA – they have a huge booth with lots of great information. Learned about the Teacher at Sea program. This is definitely happening in my future. Two weeks working at sea with researchers. Yes please!

Free Bird feeder – thanks Cornell lab of ornithology! My students are going to love it! And I'm sure it totally won't distract my middle school students as the weather gets warmer.

Middle School Chemistry – this is the website that created the chemistry curriculum I use (I’m an earth science teacher so chemistry was a little out of my wheelhouse). Went to a workshop with them and got to play with chemicals. It turns out I really like teaching chemistry.

James Webb Space Telescope – went to a screening of the movie “Into the Unknown” about the James Webb Space Telescope. It is projected to launch in 2018 and will see deeper into space than ever before. It's also going to look for evidence of life on exoplanets. After the screening two of the project engineers were there answering questions. And I got free movie snacks. Awesome!!
I would make an excellent astronaut.


The Inflatable Dome – this the second time I have been in an inflatable projection dome and I LOVE it! How can I get one of these for my school. I think  I want to live in this dome.

Andy Weir – went to a talk with the guy that wrote "The Martian". His path to becoming a successful author was pretty interesting. Maybe someday I will actually write that best selling novel….

NESTA and NMLST – there are organizations for earth science teachers and middle school teachers. I am both of those things! I’ve got to get on this…

The people – I am in a huge building full of people that love teaching and science – two of my favorite things. It’s been amazing meeting people from all over the country that are as passionate about science education as I am. And I'm a talker so I'll talk to anyone!
NSTA First timers

 At 8:30pm I finally made my way back to my room and collapsed into bed. Looking forward to what Day 3 will bring.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Musings about Rubrics

If you are reading this you probably know what a rubric is. If you don't, here's the quick and dirty. A rubric is a grading guide that is available to students. It tells them how their work is going to be evaluated and allows them to evaluate themselves. Rubrics can take many forms. Here is one I recently used with my students: A rubric I used for a project. What I wrote in the 4 column is definitely a work in progress. As a science department we are struggling with what mastery with excellence really means. In our school, as of this year, we grade on mastery grading system. There are 4 "grades" a student can get: Mastery with Excellence = you understand it so well you can teach it to others Mastery = you get it exactly as well as you should Approaching Mastery = you are almost at mastery but not quite there Not Yet Mastered = New to a skill or no where near mastering it Now, I don't know if this is the case with all mastery schools, but in...
2 comments
Read more

A Teacher or an Educator?

I hope that I am an educator and not a teacher. Let me go back a few steps.   This past week I watched a very good friend of mine give her first TEDx talk on her experiences throwing out grades (and she rocked it!). This event also featured several student speakers.   All the students were fantastic – well spoken, poised and passionate in their delivery. They had a lot of great things to say but two of those things stood out for me.   One student talked about the experiences of students working hard to create projects that only the teacher sees.   This has sparked in me a tiny revolution but I am going to go into that further in another post.   This post focuses on the talk of a young man named Timmy, a senior in high school, who counted off the number of teachers he’d had over the years that he considered educators and not just teachers. As he went on to elaborate about what made a teacher an educator, I just kept thinking, “I wonder if he would call me an...
1 comment
Read more

Your Potential is Infinite

To my students, Life is all about choices. Who you are and will be has not been decided. YOU choose who you want to be. Yes, there are some things about you that you cannot change: your race, sex, sexuality. But there are so many things you can change. And if you don’t like them, change them. But keep in mind, being a complete person takes a life time. Don’t beat yourself up if you are not yet the person you want to be. Your journey has just begun. Who you are today is not who you will be a few years from now. You will change in countless ways.   And you can control the direction of those changes. When I was in middle school, I was shy and very awkward. I wasn’t cool at all . And sometimes that really sucked. I was sensitive, I cried a lot. I was overweight and had super frizzy hair, both of which were pointed out to me and thrown at me as weapons on a regular basis. I had friends but I was by no means popular. This continued for me through college. ...
1 comment
Read more