Promising Practices Event 2013

I am a little late to post about my experience at the Saturday conference, but I had typed this all up the next day and just delayed to post it until I finished playing catch up with my blogs.

The presentation in my opinion was not as relevant in regards to teaching as I hoped it would have been. It was interesting at some points, but not at all like I was expecting it to be. I did enjoy sitting and traveling through the conference with fellow classmates. It made the day go by quicker and made me feel a lot more comfortable.

The first portion was very hard to understand and even worse to grasp the concepts in general that were being discussed. The speakers spoke more to each other than they did to the audience, and they moved so quickly I couldn't really follow the discussions for that long. When it came time for answering questions they dodged a lot of the actual questions and provided irrelevant answers. One person stated, in reply to the discussion involving equality to immigrants in schooling, that immigrants are not treated equally when it comes to standardized testing because they are not all fluent in English and are judged by their test results on a test designed for fluent English speakers. The presenter chosen to reply to the question completely dodged it. He talked about how immigrants have a more difficult path to success than most others but they still have opportunity to succeed in the same ways as anyone else. Another question by the same person was about Brown University and it was completely ignored all together, I was upset because I was really interested in hearing the answer to it.

The three portions I chose to go to were all very rushed. Only one of the presenters was very engaging and informative but all he talked about was being an active member of society by voting. It was an effective speech but not really what I was expecting to take away from a conference I thought would focus more on teaching, or at the very least things that I could apply to myself to better my ability to teach. The whole conference was just frustrating to me and what I did learn I could have gone without. One of the male presenters used language that shocked me, he referred to the African American population at one school as the "N" words. He was an older man but there's really no excuse for that. He also referred to Native Americans as Indians. All in all it was a good experience in regards to my first conference, but as for its relation to the class I couldn't find any.