Valentine's Day Weekend

I spent my Valentine's Day with Josh, a DSU colleague, on a plane to Bloomington, MN for a conference: "Critical Thinking in the Age of the Internet," sponsored by the Collaboration for the Advancement of College Teaching and Learning. We got in late Thursday night and stayed up entirely too late finalizing the details of our own presentation, which we delivered Friday.

Immediately after our presentation, Josh and I started playing the "If only . . ." game: if only we had started with this information instead of that, if only we had allowed more time for this and cut that, if only we hadn't mentioned this subject that sparked off-topic discussion and got us off track, etc. Two of the attendees, professors from an institution in SD, surprised us with their out-of-the-blue grumpiness, challenging things that Josh said, arguing with comments by other participants, and raising points that had nothing to do with our presentation topic. Post-session evaluations from other participants called those two "rude" and mentioned wishing that those two hadn't been in attendance, and Josh and I would have to agree!

The next day, a colleague of those two professors apologized "on behalf of our institution" for their behavior and explained that they are notorious at their university for being confrontational curmudgeons. That made us feel better, as did the comments of numerous people who approached us with compliments, saying they had attended our session and found it practical and useful. That's how I felt about the conference overall, even though I attended some sessions that were less useful to me personally than others. In general, it was a well run conference with lots of ideas offered for how to encourage today's college students to think critically, despite the numerous temptations for them to do otherwise.

We didn't fly home until today, so Josh and I were able to take a hotel shuttle to the Mall of America and spend much of Saturday afternoon and evening shopping and eating. I had dinner at Opa! (souvlaki and Greek salad -- Josh chose pizza elsewhere), and we had supper at Tony Roma's (pulled chicken sandwich with barbecue sauce). I was able to find some gifts for all my girlies, too (dark chocolate and extra-dark chocolate Lindor truffles from Lindt Chocolate Shop for Susan, and a piano music book of famous songs from Disney movies for the girls).

The high winds in SW ND made for an alarming descent to the Dickinson airport; if ever an airplane-hating passenger were to feel as though certain death were imminent during a flight, our final 15 minutes in the air would have seemed like proof positive to him/her. To our delight, however, we did not die, and I was very happy to be reunited with my family to dole out gifts and hear stories from the weekend.