BTN Conference

Attended the Bangkok Teacher's Network Conference today with some other teachers from school. It was at a school called Bangkok Patana, which is a British curriculum school and is absolutely amazing. Its really not far from where ASB is located, but it has several soccer fields, 3 swimming pools and about 5 basketball facilities. The school is absolutely amazing to start with.

The conference was good. It started with students being keynote speakers and that was a little scripted, so I did enjoy it so much. The students were doing their best, but for the most part you could tell they were coached on what to say and other aspects of the speach. The most interesting and best student speaker was an 11 year old girl. The others seemed snobbish and spoiled.

I attended three different sessions. The first was over Multiple Intelligences and how to utilize them in the classroom. As you probably remember, this is an important subject for me and something I truly believe in. So this was a good session. Coming out of this session, I almost felt that I need to do more in my classroom. The goal is always to reach every student and ensure that each student understands the subject matter. However, the problem is creating lessons that allow that to happen. Thats the challenge.

The second session was over SmartBoard technology, which I was very interested in. Unfortunately, this one was possibly the worst one. All the information was things I already knew and could not currently apply because I do not have a SmartBoard. The session was really a very basic introduction and nothing special. It would have been nice to have some more examples. The presenter did go over a few places to find applets and stuff like that, but it still was not as good as I was expecting.

The last session was run by a Mathematician from a University in England. He was not a teacher, so he didn't have experience in working with kids. He did have experience working with college-aged students and his session covered the issues he noticed in college-aged math students, what they struggle with. Pretty much, it was the same things I find my kids struggling with, fractions and word problems. On top of that, he didn't have solutions for how to fix these problems, just that the students were weak in these areas.

I also found this session a little different because he was saying that he has math majors who are struggling with these aspects of math. My understanding is if they are in University, they should have this knowledge already (though in my past experiences, I have noticed that this is not always the case). But on top of this, he said this was something found in math majors, which to me is a red flag for either the quality of their educational advising team, allowing or placing students in a math major who do not have the basic knowledge, or their quality of students as a whole.

I did miss a few sessions that I heard were really good and would have liked to go to, but I went to the last two sessions. But that happens with every conference that I attend. My overall thoughts on the conference were that it was good. I go into these conferences with the attitude that if I can take one thing from this, if I can learn one thing from this conference, then it was worth it. After today, I felt like I need to do more for my students and reach out to them more. Hopefully this will give me a little more energy in the classroom as well. I have been feeling tired and unmotivated as of late. I hope this little conference will change that and give me a little jolt of energy.

Aaron