The sun is out, and the wind is chilly... more like Fall than Winter. Last weekend I was in Palm Springs at the CAG Conference - for teachers of gifted students... it was a nice 70 degrees, but on the top of the mountain behind the town (Tahquitz Peak, I think it is called), it snowed!
There were quite a few good sessions, mostly on technology and several on using games to teach math so I went to a few of those. I figured that my innate fear of math could be overcome the same way I managed to conrol my fear of snakes: education on the subject. I now know more than I ever wanted to about snakes... and I'm learning about math. Perhaps the result will be the same... I'm not unreasonably afraid of snakes, and maybe my math fear is on the way out as well. Seriously, I did enjoy learning the math games, but I do feel a bit stupid when I'm around folks who enjoy math.
One of the presenters I heard made the point that our students are "Digital Natives"; they have grown up speaking technology. There has never been a time in most of their lives that electronic communication did not exist: the Internet was popularized in about 1994 by Netscape - and the rest is electronic history. Students are very comfortable with cell phones, computers, PDAs, and all manner of electronic communication. They may not be as cautious as we'd like them to be, nor as skilled in it's use as they think they are... but they are comfortable/ conversant. Most of the teachers and parents are "Digital Immigrants"; technology is a second language for us. This is not to say we are not good at using it, but we wern't born into technology. There are adults who are "Digital Legal Aliens"; folks who are not native speakers, but are fully bi-lingual and who have no expectation of ever returning to the time before the new technology. Good analogies and a good presentation.
The plane ride home was bumpy - a very big storm in the Bay area closed one of the SFO runways, and we couldn't even take off until almost three hours after our scheduled take-off time. Returned to more rain and cold... but glad to be back.