I talked to a few more teachers this afternoon. There are folks from all across the country here this week, but I somehow managed to talk to two people from the West Coast in a row. They weren’t together, so just random chance. Maybe once the total attendance in calculated, someone could calculate the odds of that happening?

Allison Bogart, a middle school science teacher from Lake Isabella, California, is attending her first national NSTA conference, thanks to winning  the Delta Ed/Frey-Neo/CPO Science Education Awards for Inquiry-Based Science Teaching. Lake Isabella, California: “It’s my first national conference. I’m only here because I’m an NSTA award winner,” she explains. “That’s really the only reason I could be here. Otherwise, I could never afford it on my own and my school district wouldn’t let em, especially with the terrible budget crisis happening in California right now.
“I hope to learn the best ideas of science teachers throughout the nation and steal them and use them in my own classroom. Because I teach eighth grade physical science, I would love to learn more tips and tricks and techniques; learn more doing more on a budget, doing more with less or doing more to encourage science inquiry especially in my middle grades. I also teach math so I’m going to a lot of workshops that have to do with the integration of science and math together. I’m here with my husband who’s a math teacher so he’s going to those too. It’s kind of cool. We’re kind of collaborating on units we can teach together.”

Marybeth (sorry, I missed your last name—if you read this, drop me a note in the comments and I’ll update the post!) is in Philadelphia for her first national NSTA conference as well. “I live in Washington state. I had the opportunity to come over and it was paid for, so I came,” she says. “I need more professional development. I wanted to get some good ideas for teaching [10th grade]biology next year. It’s not a new subject, but I’ve been in the middle school for 10 years. There’s been a lot of new developments in the field so I wanted to come and brush up. I found a lot of good ideas.”

I loved how Christina Dragon’s presentation “She Discovered It! Bringing Women Scientists to Life in the Classroom” turned into a lively interactive discussion about how to reach girls in science. Christina, a hospital research technician, gave an overview of notable women scientists and how they and their work were largely ignored in the past. “You don’t even have to do the whole class about them,” she advised teachers. “Just drop a name” to inspire girls in your classroom.

Listeners turned into contributors, as various audience members shared resources and strategies for getting girls psyched. One teacher said both girls and boys appreciate hands-on activities, while another described how she focuses on textiles and makeup to help girls learn science is a part of their everyday lives. Christina’s mother, who is also a scientist, said she and her students at a teen parent academy explored the science of cooking, the absorbency of diapers, and the physics of toys.
Other attendees referred us to AAUW’s new report Why So Few? Women in STEM and a website called STEM Equities Pipeline, which contains research about gender and science.