Convention

What an amazing few days. I think I'll be blogging about the convention for a long time. We've gone every year since I was pregnant with Jake, and we've always enjoyed it, but this year was the best in a long time! Every speaker that I saw was great. I'm too exhausted tonight to be articulate, but once I decompress I will have a lot to say. Jeff Myers and Linda Werner were so inspirational, I plan to dedicate entire posts (or a series of posts) to what they have to say. Debra Bell talked about homeschooling high school and the future of education (including her belief that brick and mortar schools will be a thing of the past in our lifetime--and we'll already be ahead of the game). Jean Burk taught us about tricks and patterns with the SATs and how figuring them out can lead to lots of money for college {in her words, the time spend practicing for the SATs can literally pay you $500 per hour in scholarship money}. For those of you unfamiliar with this particular convention there are 6 hour long time slots both Friday and Saturday with 10 options for each slot. I also attended the leaders' forum on Thursday. So that made for a lot of opportunites to hear a lot of different kinds of people talk. Plenty of people are there to "peddle their wares" (the exhibit hall has over 1000 vendors), but I've always been a fan of the speakers who believe you could basically throw a dart in the exhibit hall to pick a curriculum and academically your kids will be fine. Those are the ones who challenge you to grow and change and be all you can be. The ones who encourage you to get your priorities straight and make sure you put the big rocks in the jar first. The ones that say people begin homeschooling for a variety of reasons (religious, academic, social, etc), but people continue homeschooling because of what it does for their families. Those speakers are my heroes. I hope to take what I've gotten out of these last few days and share it with as many people as I can. I'm thinking my blog is a good place to start.