Recap of Canada

I should have posted this one before the last post - but I'm killing time on the shuttle and might as well post an update about my trip to Canada last week. I went to the yearly AAPT (American Association of Physics Teachers) summer conference and the PERC (Physics Education Research Conference) that occurs immediately after it each summer. The conference is always invigorating, as I get to talk to a lot of people, learn about different projects, network, and come home with great new ideas and inspiration. People are always really supportive about what I'm doing and what I've accomplished and seem genuinly interested in seeing what we find next, so I always am pumped to work even harder when I get home from

For this particular conference, I went two days early and attended 12 hours of workshops on how to teach the curriculum that I'm interested in starting to use in my classroom. I was already tired by the time the conference started, but I met a nice local high school teacher and got to see a bit more of the city over the weekend. I also took a great walk along the river (the Edmonton River Valley) which was quite pretty.

The first conference ran from Sunday evening to Wed afternoon, with the second one running from Wed evening to Thursday evening. I only had one poster on Monday, nothing on Tuesday (though I was busy all day with networking and attending talks), but on Wed, I had to give a talk, a poster, and be on a panel discussion! Then on Thursday I presented a poster in a focused session that ran two times for a total of 3 hours. It was quite a lot of work all in one 26 hour chunk. Needless to say I was happy to return home - and very tired when I did!!

I must say, though, it was very nice to be attending the conference as someone who has a job and goals at my institution, such that presenting at the conference is not the "end-all" but merely a nice stop along the way. I had things prepared in advance, and was not very stressed during the conference. I was a bit nervous for my talk because I was giving a talk on why more rigorous research methods are needed for studying "writing to learn" (which was my thesis topic), and two of the people whose results I criticized strongly in my thesis were in the same session as me. I have no idea if they have seen my thesis, or were even paying attention to my talk... I think my talk went very well, and the session chair seemed very interested in my work - so hopefully I'm going in the right direction...