TMC14 – A Newbie’s Reflections Part 1

I am currently sitting quietly in the Detroit airport and I’ll be here all night. Weather foiled my return home today after 4 pretty terrific days at twittermathcamp2014

I have quite a bit that I want to sort out about this event and I’ll do so over the next few days in a couple of parts.

A number of people have already written and many more will about their experiences. There will be posts talking about the transformative effects of this working/learning/playing experience if history is any guide. A number of thoughtful posts have already been made. A couple of them are really touching and reflect insecurity (see here by @MrKent800, see here by @lmhenry9). Glancing at my neglected digg reader I see that there are posts waiting to be read from @pamjwilson over at her blog The Radical Rational, @algebrasfriend over at her blog and others as well. My tweet deck is hopping and I am paying closer attention to much of it because I can place some human names and faces to the tweets and to the quick chatter between folks. I’m going to try and capture my days in Jenks, OK and I hope I am fairly thorough in recognizing and thanking some folks who have been pretty important in this experience. Before I embark, it’s important – at least to me – to note that before arriving in the Tulsa airport Weds shortly before noon that I have physically met only one person who will be at the conference. That person is the charming @JustinAion who wrote a daily blog (honestly, he wrote every school day!!!) over here. I’m pretty outgoing when I am comfortable in a situation. I was worried about whether I’d hit that comfort zone at all in my time in OK on this trip.

In advance of the trip I, and many others, had filled in information in a google doc about our arrival and departure plans and folks started volunteering to take people from the airport to the hotel. Pam (@pamjwilson who blogs here) volunteered to take me to the hotel in her rental car. We had a lovely chat at the airport waiting for our car, ran into another group who we followed to the hotel. This trip was a bit of an adventure as our ‘guides’ made two quick reversals during the trip. We got to the hotel a bit early before rooms were supposed to be available, but we lucked out and got into our rooms pretty quickly. Hungry from our travels Pam and I ate lunch with two of the people from the car we followed. I’m disappointed in myself that I do not remember their names.

A nice nap back at the hotel before heading to a gathering room in the back of the hotel where people were chatting, snacking, playing games, etc. The name tags that we would wear the rest of the week were at the host school so we were introducing ourselves mostly just by first names.  Now, remember that I have never met any of these folks in person – other than Justin who brought piles of games to share so I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed here. I chat for awhile and enjoy myself. I briefly meet Tina (@crstn85 who blogs here) – this was a major goal of mine for this first night. Tina is the reason I came to TMC. She invited me to help her organize and run the Precalculus morning session. She and I had exchanged some comments and emails about her amazing Nix The Tricks project and I was (and am) totally flattered that she asked me to join in. We chatted very briefly but I felt better actually meeting her before our work commenced on Thursday morning. After bouncing around a bit I retire kind of early. I could not help feeling a little bit like an outsider. It’s a feeling that is hard for me to shake during the week. This is mostly on me, by the way. All week long folks were welcoming and friendly, but being brand new to this community in the physical sense and being relatively new to the community in the virtual world as well, it was hard for me not to notice the deep bonds between many of the folks here.

Sleep calls to me now. Although it’ll be sleep on the floor in the Detroit airport, I need to succumb. More thoughts soon on the week’s activities – both in the context of the day’s formal activities as well as on the informal social life of the twittermathcamp experience.