wow.

wow.

That's about all I can say at the end of this week. Our school division just finished our annual week-long conference and, like usual, it was amazing. All week long I attended sessions by my two heroes in education world: Tony Wayne and John Antonetti.

Mr. Wayne was my high school physics teacher and he was the best teacher I ever had. He is absolutely one of the best teachers in Albemarle County, if not THE best. His was the one class that I can remember the most. I could go on and on right now telling you the demonstrations he did, experiments we did, facts we learned, the way he taught, why I remember so much, etc. There is no other class that I can do that for. The cool thing was that in his sessions it felt so much like being back in his class, but I see it in a different way now. Now I watch how he leads the sessions and analyze how he communicates ideas, engages the listeners, and guides thinking. At the end of his classes/sessions I leave with the feeling, "Man, that was awesome!" and want to go tell everyone about it. I hope that my kids will leave my class thinking that one day.

John Antonetti is my other education hero. I met him last year at the same conference. He is an amazing speaker, hilarious, with an ability to completely captivate an audience. This man can make a 3-hour session go by as if it was 15 minutes. He's researched over 6,000 classrooms and analyzed the information he gathered to come to some incredible conclusions for how to engage students and increase learning. In two-days worth of sessions, he left me with five bazillion ideas that I am somehow going to have to narrow down to a focus. One of the coolest ideas involves solving the problem that kids often can't figure out WHY it's important to learn what we're learning. They don't see the relevance to their life. The idea is to have the kids keep a notebook about what they want to be when they grow up. Then, each time we teach a unit, whether in science, social studies, reading, math, etc., the kids can write in their notebook about what that week's learning has to do with their future career. For example, kids who want to be policemen would write about why geography and maps are important to police officers. They could write about how estimating numbers, or probability, or fractions, or ANYTHING relates to policemen. Of course, there were many more ideas too, but I need some time to process all the ideas and then find the ones that I really want to focus the most on next year!

Wow. I can't wait for next school year!