With so much to see and do at the conference, I shouldn’t be surprised by the number of people I see no matter how early I arrive. If there’s a workshop going on, there are people in there.
When I arrived at the conference center this morning, there was an odor in one hall that took me back to my 7th grade science class. At a hands-on workshop, a number of attendees were refining their dissection skills. I’m not ashamed to say that wasn’t a workshop I was in a rush to join—I wasn’t very good at dissection back in 7th grade and I really didn’t want to relive those days. Sorry, Ms. Hess, where ever you are!
I did attend one on developing assessment tests. It seemed like the participants could hardly wait to ask questions. With so much government emphasis on meeting standards, they wanted to know why it wasn’t necessarily a good thing if most students got a standards-aligned question correct and how to use the assessment results to help their students.
I also attended Lamont Flowers’ seminar on the Black Experience in Science Education. He challenged the audience to do their own research on how to improve the science education of African Americans and all Americans. He was right when he said, “With education comes options.” Don’t all children deserve to have a number of options available to them?