Live From the NEA Convention in San Diego

Reporting Live from the NEA Convention in San Diego

I’ve just completed my second day in San Diego for the National Education Association Convention. It’s been a whirlwind of activity after activity.

We, the five members of my Roanoke County traveling group, flew from Roanoke to San Diego on Tuesday. We began our travels on a 4:30pm flight from Roanoke to Charlotte to Dallas to San Diego. The trip was long and mostly uneventful. We arrived in San Diego at midnight, exhausted.

The very next morning at 7:30 PST, my roommate-Bud- and I joined a group of about fifteen others to work two Habitat for Humanity job sites. My site is called “The Libby Lake Build.” Over the next two years or so, Habitat plans to build twenty median income houses there. Each house has between 1300 sq ft and 1800sq ft. That’s a lot bigger than their normal project, and the clients have more means than usual. Basically, they are trying to make median houses affordable to people with less means.

I spent the day at Libby Lake becoming intimate with a wheel barrow. I’d load it with dirt, take the load over a bumpy ungraded house pad to what will eventually be a landscaped area behind a backyard retaining wall. Then the wheel barrow would travel up an intense ramp to the dump zone. We were joined by a group of youth and their two leaders from a service camp youth service organization based out of Canada. The high schoolers, who were mostly from the Northeast USA, are in the midst of spending 23 days in LA and San Diego doing service projects and going on fun excursions. Other than slightly damaging my shin when the wheel barrow bucked me, I survived the day and helped haul about 40 cubic yards of soil into its new home. We had a math teacher working in our crew who helped create that estimate.

That evening, the VEA delegation was treated to dinner at our hotel. Afterwards, we had an auction to raise money for our political action committee. My job was to spell the chief auctioneer about midway through. As I waited, I thought and thought how I would grab the crowd’s attention when I went to the microphone. There were about 100 people in the room when I stepped up to the mic. “Bar the doors!” I said. “I’ll guess your age or weight. Age within two years; weight within five pounds.”…the room went dead silent and people just stared at me as if I were completely nuts. So I moved on and proceeded with the auction with very little attempt to have humor. I swear, that line usually has the ladies rolling on the floor and laughing hard.

Wednesday morning, we started the day with a state caucus meeting and breakfast at our Omni Hotel. The hotel, which adjoins Petco Stadium-Home of the Padres, is quite lovely. After the caucus, everyone headed across the street to the convention center to attend a town hall style meeting with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. He spoke to us for about a half hour then answered questions from a panel and from regular NEA members. During that time, we all agreed to work together and listen to each other so that we could constructively forge creative and concrete solutions to the crisis in education.

On the way out, we threaded our way through anti-abortion protestors who were shouting at us and displaying large posters with pictures of aborted fetuses. These people were repulsive, abhorrent, and incredibly un-Christian. A truck circled the convention with signs plastered on its sides which indicated that members of the NEA were condemned to Hell. I wonder what God thinks of their tactics? Interestingly, NEA has no position on abortion, either pro or con. It does support a woman’s choice, so I suppose that’s why these people weren’t happy. Despite their anger, rage, and rudeness, I would still teach their children.

I spent my afternoon, hanging out on the patio beside the pool at the hotel working on my Facebook farm. I’ve neglected it somewhat on this trip and had to harvest my crops and replant. In the evening, our group took off to the Hard Rock Café for a nice dinner. Then I spent the evening walking along the harbor down to the USS Midway, which is permanently moored in the harbor. Overall, it was a very full day. Thursday brings the official opening of the representative assembly where about 10,000 delegates from all across American will gather in one room and hash out our positions on vital education issues.

Late