Thursday we ventured into Dr. Walkuski's presentation and were really impressed about what he had to say. He really inspired me to take action on my professional development. He gave us a packet with ways to improve our marketability and networking status. The best part was that he gave us deadlines for each, so now we cannot just push away the paper. We have to reach our goals by our deadlines. What was very interesting was at the end of the session there was an administrator from Lockport who basically verified everything that was said in the presentation. He also talked about how intense the job market is. He said they have hired 4 teachers in 5 years and the last one they hired the school did not even advertise they had an opening and they received 125 applications which they then selected 20 for interviews and called back 6. That was scary to hear. It basically told me my resume has to be filled with such unreal achievements and then if I happen to be called for an interview I have 10 minutes to tell him why I am the best. It really opened my eyes.
Friday morning started with a bang as we went to the keynote speaker which was unreal. He was very personable as he spoke about spirit, mind, body and emotion. I really cannot describe it but I will give some quotes the man gave us. "To know and not to do is not to know", "You can have people healed but not cured, cured but not healed." and my personal favorite was "Humans are like tea bags, you do not know their strength until they are put into hot water." That one really moved me, it made me think about so many people that did so many great things when under pressure. For example, surviving cancer. That is the hottest water you can find and people who survive that have unreal strength.
The next presentation did not go as well; Dr. Bailey's presentation was canceled due to illness (good thing shell be teaching me next semester so I wont be missing out to much). We instead went to watch Ryan Ingalls officially become President of the Future Professionals section of AAHPERD. They also had a free lunch which was a pretty good perk as well as a good raffle where I won a whistle. SUNY Cortland won majority of the prizes so we rubbed it in Brockport's face which was funny. We had a war of words all week. After that we went to a presentation by the NYS elementary teacher of the year.
She was very good and we got a nice sized packet of awesome games to play which were very educational and had a lot of inter-task variation. She also told us how she incorporates her lesson's with the teacher's to include more educational task. The last presentation I went to was very interesting in terms of liability. A group of teachers from Rochester did a presentation on low budget games. The thing that was interesting about it is about 75% of the games they used involved a pegging or (dodge ball) style. They did stress safety saying you can only throw it underhand and only hit below the knees and if you hit above the knees you were automatically out. I asked one of them after about it and they felt that if they stress the safety they should be alright but I was still iffy about it and would hesitate if my administrators watched my class often. That night we went to the Jay B. Nash dinner and got a real good meal while watching some unbelievable people get teacher of the year awards. It was really cool to see this as this is what we are all striving to be. 
Saturday morning I presided for a group from Syracuse who did a presentation call Food, Fun, Fitness. It was very good as they incorporated lifetime fitness and food into their games. Also on a side note they were advised by Dr. Sandy Bargainnier a former professor of our very own Professor Yang. Overall This was a phenomenal experience and I advise every P.E. major take advantage of such a great opportunity when they can.
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