NOAO Office of Public Affairs and Educational Outreach

From the 2006 NSTA Meeting in Anaheim

Part 2 - “The Return from NSTA”

Well, I made it back from the National Science Teachers Association meeting in Anaheim late on Saturday afternoon. I was so tired at the airport that I didn’t notice until the last minute that I could make an earlier flight, since LA traffic was light and the airport van arrived early. I made the earlier flight going standby, though my luggage did not.

Speaking of luggage, I had to take mine in to be repaired on Monday. It is a time-honored tradition to take home as many resources as possible from the NSTA exhibit floor to share with teachers back home, and my luggage suffered as usual. Now I have to figure out a way to get these materials out of my office and to the teachers that I collected them for. I already have two boxes of educational materials in my office from before the meeting to send to teachers in Chile and Singapore who are doing special astronomy programs.

The NSTA meeting ended well, with our last session (of five) addressing the Spitzer-TLRBSE teacher and student research program on Saturday. Three teachers who do research presented results from their projects and their work was very impressive. Our turnout was less than our other workshops, and our room for this presentation was a very large ballroom, for some reason. It turned out that we were competing with an Earth science “share-a-thon” and Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” as well as a conference trip to Disneyland.

I continue to be heartened and amazed by the durability and enthusiasm of the teachers we work with from across the country. The conference was a marathon, with meetings and lounge discussions running until close to midnight each night. We also met for dinner with our TLRBSE teachers who were at Kitt Peak last summer, and had a business meeting with them on Friday night. It was great to see them, and hear more about how their year is going.

For many of these teachers, our travel funding support enabled them to make this their first-ever NSTA meeting, even though most of them have taught for 15-20 years. This is like an astronomer working for 20 years before going to their first AAS meeting. The problem of teacher isolation, and lack of treatment as a professional or expert, is an important one for the teaching profession, and for teachers in how they view themselves.

The 2007 NSTA national meeting is in St. Louis in a year from now. However, proposals for sessions, workshops, and talks are due in a few days, leaving so little time to reflect on this year’s meeting before planning on presentations at the next one. This one-year gap between proposal and presentation is discouraging to me. It seems symbolic of some inefficiency in the conference system or organization. If the NSTA national conference system were to become just slightly less efficient, perhaps we will have to submit proposals for next year’s national meeting just ahead of leaving for this year’s meeting! In contrast, I find that most science teachers are flexible, ingenious, great at improvising with just a few materials, and relatively intolerant of inefficiencies. They are probably the world’s greatest “just-in-time” experts. They have to be, with all of the demands now placed upon them—including abstracts for presentations that they may want to give one year from now.