Well, maybe not a million, but certainly many. While I was travelling to San Antonio for the annual ACTFL meeting to present on my academic activities, it seems that my non-professional mind was hard at work cooking up blog posts. Potential titles include
- The Dichotomy of Drought
- From Ships of the Sea to Movers of the Earth
- Thanks for the aluminum jungle gym and the headache
- Las entradas de la fe
and I’m sure there were others that may have been obliterated by margaritas. Any votes on which to tackle first?
All in all, the conference was wonderful. Harried as usual, but really energizing. On Friday morning, I played hooky for a few hours and drove out to see the Missions on the San Antonio Mission trail. I took an opportunty to take both tourist photos, and artsy photos while I concentrated on the the architectural details and remains of the three missions I visited, Mission Concepcion, Mission San Jose, and Mission Espada. What a beautiful step back in time that was for me and a great way to tap into my artistic and imanginative side. The Spanish colonial architecture drew me in, as it always does, to a place deep inside my childhood imagination, where conquistadors and pirates populate an imagination as fertile as the rainforest and as vast as the desert.
Once back in conference central, I spend the rest of the time networking with other language professionals and attending conference sessions related to my interest in technology for language teaching and learning. I also fell in with the other members of IALLT who were in attendance, which made the whole experience a kind of portfolio-expanding pub-crawl. The final margarita count was 9, a new record!
But I’m glad to be home now, and coming up on the Thanksgiving holidays. It will give me time to both catch my breath, catch up with my thoughts, and catch a few extra hours with those who are most important to me.
eTrish 