“Are you doing anything this weekend?” Mrs. Tracy asked me, as I packed up my things after my period student teaching in her classroom ended.

“The Shorehaven conference,” I replied.

“Oh, that’s right!  That’s this weekend!  I haven’t been to that in a few years.  Is this your first time, as a new student teacher?”

“Yeah!  I’m kind of excited!”

“Have you been to the Shorehaven conference grounds before?  Didn’t you grow up around there?”

“Yes.  Plumdale is about thirty miles away from Ocean Grove.  I’ve been to Ocean Grove many times, but not actually on the conference grounds.”

“It’s beautiful!  You’ll love it!”

“That’s good.”

“Have a great weekend!  I’ll see you Monday!” Mrs. Tracy said.

“You too!”

A couple months ago, in our student teaching seminar, Dr. Van Zandt told us about an annual conference bringing together hundreds of mathematics teachers from all over the northern half of the state.  He encouraged us to attend, even though the event was at Shorehaven Conference Grounds in Ocean Grove, a three hour drive from Jeromeville each way.  We would have to pay our own expenses, but since my parents lived just thirty miles away, I could stay with them and avoid the cost of either a room at the conference grounds or an overpriced touristy hotel room in or near Ocean Grove.

The schedule included a keynote address on a Friday night, breakout sessions and vendor booths all day Saturday, and two large group speeches on Sunday morning.  Some of the breakout sessions included materials given out to attendees; I had to choose two of these in advance, because of the limited supply of materials.  After I sent my registration form and fees, I received my name badge and tickets to the two ticketed sessions in the mail.

The Shorehaven conference, officially the “Western Mathematics Council Education Conference – North, Shorehaven,” was held annually on the weekend after Thanksgiving.  I had no education classes on Friday afternoons, so after I came home from student teaching on that Friday morning, I spent the rest of the afternoon packing.  I only needed two changes of clothes, but I packed an extra change of clothes as I always did.

I left Jeromeville around two o’clock and took the slightly longer route home down the Valley.  On a Friday afternoon, the more direct route through Los Nogales and San Tomas would lead me directly into the middle of massive traffic snarls.  I arrived at my parents’ house around five; Mom said she would have dinner ready for me.  She made chicken and mashed potatoes.  Since this was a work trip, I made sure Mom knew that I only had an hour at most before I had to leave for the conference.

The drive had been cold and gloomy.  The gray December sky that had been above me so far on this trip had turned completely dark by the time I left my parents’ house, except for a faint glow in the east where the moon was rising behind the clouds.  I drove south on Highway 11 and turned at the south end of Plumdale onto Highway 127 west.  Five miles down the road, in Carsonville, Highway 127 merged with Highway 2 south and ran parallel to the coast.  Carsonville was near the mouth of the Gabilan River and its fertile surrounding valley, so here the highway ran a few miles inland, surrounded by farmland.  I drove over a few low hills across the cities of Marine Beach, Seaview, and Santa Lucia, then exited on Highway 86 west toward Ocean Grove.

This stretch of Highway 86 was a twisting two-lane road that climbed a thickly forested hill, but since it was dark, I would have to wait until morning to enjoy the view.  After a few miles, the road widened and became Cypress Avenue.  When I saw Cypress Middle School at the corner with Sycamore Avenue, I turned onto a side street and looked for a place to park on the side of the street, finding one about a block past the school.

The conference was so large that it took up three locations within about a mile and a half of each other: the actual conference grounds on the beach, this school near the top of a hill, and Ocean Grove High School in between.  The Friday keynote address was at the middle school, the two Sunday talks were at the conference grounds, and the Saturday breakout sessions and vendor tables were at all three locations, with the local school district donating its buses to be used as shuttle buses between the three sites..

Cypress Middle School was an old building, probably from the early twentieth century.  To my knowledge, middle schools were a newer concept around here; this building looked like something from the era of when only elementary and high schools existed.  I wondered if this school might have originally been an elementary or high school. I walked inside, where two people sat at a table with boxes full of tote bags.  “Hi,” one of them said.  “Do you have your name badge?”

“Yes,” I replied, handing it to her.  She looked through a very long list, found my name, and handed me a tote bag.

“Enjoy!” she said.

Apparently I got a free tote bag for attending this event.  I was not expecting that.  The bag was black, with a yellow logo printed on it, some kind of repeating fractal design with spirals.  Above it was printed the slogan “Mathematics Is Beautiful,” and below it, “Western Mathematics Council 1998.”

I carried the tote bag as I followed signs to the theater.  Cypress Middle School was a two-story building, with a strange layout; in order to reach the theater, I had to climb to the second floor, go around a corner, and then go back down a different set of stairs.  The theater was large, with probably around a thousand seats, not typical of any theater found in any middle school I had seen before.  I was almost certain now that this building had once been the local high school.

When I arrived, the theater was only around a quarter full, and I did not see anyone I recognized.  I took a seat and looked through my tote bag to see what was inside.  An updated catalog of courses, including last minute changes and corrections.  A note pad, with the conference logo and dates of upcoming conferences from this year through 2002.  A lanyard and plastic sleeve in which to put my name badge.  A pencil and pen.

The speaker was a curriculum director for some school district in the suburbs of Bay City.  He was talking about the importance of cultural diversity and how students from different cultures respond to various scenarios in school.  I tuned out about halfway through, because I had heard a lot of this in one of my education classes, and this was a hot-button issue in those days that I did not completely agree with.  Every student is different, yes, and as a teacher I should be familiar with my students enough to recognize that some will react differently to school settings than others.  But assuming that students will be a certain way because of their cultures, or the colors of their skin, to me seemed like just racial stereotyping all over again.

In those days, when I slept at my parents’ house, I was usually on a school break, so it was a little difficult to wake up at 6:00 to get ready.  I wanted to lie in bed for a while Saturday morning, but I had to get up and get dressed, because I had a ticket for an 8:00 session.

Highway 86 was much more beautiful in the light of the rising sun, with views of the ocean from the summit of the hill.  I parked near where I had parked the day before at Cypress Middle School and walked to my session.  It was about algebra tiles, small plastic blocks used to model simplifying, factoring, and expanding algebraic expressions.  This session came with a free sample of three-dimensional algebra tiles, which could be used to model expressions with exponents up to the third power, whereas traditional flat tiles could only be used for the second power.  I could see where this would be a useful manipulative, but it seemed like it would take a long time to teach students how to use them, long enough that I was not sure it would be useful.

I had an hour and a half until my next session, so next I walked around the vendors in the school cafeteria.  I took lots of business cards, pamphlets, and free samples of pens and pencils as sales professionals tried to convince me to buy calculators, classroom manipulatives, and computer software.  As a student teacher, I was not in a position to make a large purchase, but I was interested in knowing what was out there.  I spent money once that day, and it happened when I turned a corner and saw a booth selling mathematics-related t-shirts.  I knew I had to get something.

“Do you have the quadratic formula shirt in an extra large?” I asked, pointing to the shirt in question. “I’m teaching that right now, actually.”

“Let me look,” the man behind the table said.  He looked through a box and pulled out a shirt in my size.  “We only have it in green.  Is that okay?”

“Sure,” I said.  I paid him and put the t-shirt in my tote bag.

After I finished walking around the vendor tables, I left the cafeteria through the back door, which opened right onto a street running behind the school.  I got on the next school bus to arrive and rode through the neighborhoods of Ocean Grove, a little over a mile down a gently sloping hill, to the main conference grounds.

I had never seen the Shorehaven Conference Center up close, and it was absolutely beautiful.  About twenty-five old wooden buildings, many with stone chimneys, were scattered among coastal cypress and live oak trees, with the beach just beyond a row of dunes at the west end of the conference center.  The north side of the grounds held dormitories, with exhibition halls and meeting rooms on the south side.  I found the room for the next session on my schedule, where I sat listening to a veteran teacher speak on creative ways to keep students engaged in learning.  I wondered if any of that would work for the difficult students I had in Mrs. Matthews’ Basic Math B class.

Next, I climbed a hill to a large exhibition hall, an imposing wooden structure with a stone façade in front and tall paned windows.  The catalog said that there were more vendors in here, but a quick look around showed me that these vendors were mostly textbook publishers.

“Are you adopting?” one saleswoman asked me as I approached her table.

“Huh?” I asked instinctively.  Adopting?  Like adopting a baby?  That did not make sense in this context.  I was not sure what she was asking.

“Is your school adopting this year?” she repeated.

I still was not sure what she was talking about, so I said, “No.  I’m just looking.”

“Can I tell you about our program, so you’ll remember us in your next adoption year?”

“Sure,” I said.

As she began to explain the features of the textbook that she was selling, I inferred from the context that “adopting” is educational bureaucrat jargon for selecting and buying new textbooks and curriculum.  As I flipped through one of her books, she explained that this was an integrated curriculum.  “So, instead of having algebra one year and geography another year, you get it all combined.  We don’t have a geography book, but if you do our three-year core high school curriculum, you get all the material for a year of geography.”

I nodded, more confused than ever.  This was math, not social studies.  Why would there be geography in this textbook?  Was this curriculum so integrated that these textbooks taught math and social studies? I did not see any maps in the book I was flipping through, just math.  “So can I sign you up for anything?” she asked

“I’m not ready to get anything now.”

“That’s okay.  Here’s my card.  Contact me when your school is adopting.”

“Thank you.  I will.”

“Enjoy the weekend!”

“Thanks!” I said.  As I walked around the room, about two minutes later it occurred to me that all of her talk about geography was actually about geometry.  I reached into my tote bag, found her business card, and threw it away; no student needs to learn from a textbook published by a company whose sales representatives do not know the difference between geometry and geography.

I finished walking around the publishers’ exhibits shortly before noon.  I had a session at 1:00 back at Cypress Middle School, and I was picking up a box lunch at the school.  But instead of waiting for the next shuttle bus, I decided to walk.  I followed the same route I had taken on the bus, walking out the main entrance, across Shorehaven Avenue, and straight down Sycamore Avenue to the school.

Ocean Grove is a great town to take a walk.  The neighborhoods closest to the beach have no sidewalks and curbs, just beautifully kept up old houses among large cypress, pine, and live oak trees, some covered with Spanish moss.  I saw squirrels climbing trees and birds flying by.

The walk to the school was a little over a mile.  About a third of the way there, a curb appeared on the side of the street, and parts of the street now had a paved sidewalk as well. This neighborhood looked more like a typical well-kept older suburban area, the trees not quite as dense or tall.  The overcast December sky that had hung over my trip home yesterday had given way to a beautiful blue, cool and breezy but sunny with no clouds in sight.  This part of Sycamore Avenue ran along the top of a ridge, and a few times during my walk, while crossing a street, I could look to my left down the cross street and see the dark blue ocean far off below me, with the faint hazy outline of the Lorenzo Mountains even farther away across the Santa Lucia Bay.

When I arrived at the school and walked to the table where the lunches were being distributed, I saw Ron Pinkerton, Melissa Becker, and Ryan Gaines from my student teaching program sitting at a picnic table.  I sat with them after I got my lunch.  “How’s your day been?” Ron asked.

“Good so far,” I said.  “I have a session here at 1 about teaching fractions.  The Basic Math B class is doing things with fractions right now, and a lot of them don’t get it at all.  Then back to the grounds to hear Howard Jacobsen at 4. He wrote the textbook that Ryan and I use for Basic B at Nueces High, and I also used one of his textbooks in high school.”

“Howard Jacobsen will be good,” Ryan said.  “I’m not gonna make it, though.”

“We’re gonna go check out the vendors inside,” Melissa said a few minutes later after she and the others finished their lunch.  “Have you been in there yet?”

“Yeah,” I replied.  “I got a quadratic formula t-shirt.”

“Nice!  I’m going to Howard Jacobsen, so I’ll see you there?”

“Yeah,” I replied.  “Have fun in there.”

After the session about fractions, I now had some new ideas on how to make the students visualize what fractions really meant.  Now I had to take another shuttle bus back to the grounds.  The walk was pleasant, but I did not particularly want to walk that far a second time today.  When I arrived at the grounds, I walked toward the beach and found a nice big rock to sit on.  I closed my eyes for a bit, but I was not positioned comfortably enough to fall asleep, even with the soothing low roar of waves breaking as background noise.

As the time for Howard Jacobsen’s talk drew near, I started walking in that direction.  The room was mostly full when I arrived, just in time, but I saw Melissa, and she had saved me a seat next to her.  “Thanks,” I whispered to her.

Mr. Jacobsen did not look much like I imagined.  I recognized him from the “About the Author” page in the Basic B textbook, but he was older now.  He was shorter than average for a man, and his head, with slightly bushy gray hair and a mustache, looked too big for his well-dressed body.  But once he began speaking, I was instantly fascinated.  “Every year,” he explained, “I keep an eye out for stories in the news that I can use in my classroom.  Here are some of my favorites for this year.”

Mr. Jacobsen showed a photo on the projector of a drawing of a normal human, with marks showing his height at six feet, then next to him a drawing of a giant baby, also six feet tall.  “Babies do not look like miniature humans,” he explained.  “Their different body parts grow at different rates.  So if you scale a baby up to six feet tall, it looks different from an adult man.  I used this illustration last year when I was teaching proportions.”

Next, Mr. Jacobsen put a photograph on the projector of a man dressed like Elvis Presley jumping out of an airplane with a parachute, and a table showing the number of professional Elvis impersonators in various years.  “So this article was talking about the rapid growth in the number of Elvis impersonators since the time of Elvis’ death.  You could easily tie this into a lesson about exponential growth.”  He next showed a page of equations on the projector and added, “Here we calculate that, if the growth rates continue, by the middle of the twenty-first century, every human being on Earth will be an Elvis impersonator.”  Many people in the audience laughed, including me.

After an hour of such examples, when the talk ended, I said goodbye to Melissa, who was headed to dinner with some of the others from our class.  She invited me, but I had plans to have dinner with my parents.  After Melissa left, before I went home, I walked up to Mr. Jacobsen at the front of the room and nervously said, “Mr. Jacobsen?”

“Yes?” he replied, turning around.

“Hi.  I don’t know you.  My name is Greg Dennison, I’m a student teacher from Jeromeville, and one of the classes I’m student teaching is using your Survey of Mathematics textbook.  And I used your geometry textbook myself eight years ago when I was in high school.  I just wanted to say I love your textbook writing style.”

“Thank you!” Mr. Jacobsen replied, sounding genuinely pleased.

“I love the way you creatively work in so many other topics and find ways to connect them to math.  Just like what you were talking about today.  It’s very unique, and that’s why your textbook stood out to me all these years.”

“Thank you so much.  That’s what I try to do.  It was nice meeting you, Greg.”

“You too.  I’ll probably see you next year if you’re here again.”

“I should be!” he exclaimed.  “I look forward to it!”

I skipped the Sunday morning sessions and got back to Jeromeville around lunch time on Sunday, as I had planned.  I had some reading to do for my classes.

Dr. Van Zandt was at Nueces High School on Monday, to record his student teachers there and make observations.  He observed me in Mrs. Tracy’s class third period, but he did not know that I had a little surprise planned for the class.

I wrote “ax² + bx + c = 0,” the general form of a quadratic equation, on the board.  “The first problem for today is going to walk you through how to get x by itself, to solve this equation,” I said.  “Work on that in your groups, fill in the blanks, then we’ll talk about it together.” I walked around, helping students get unstuck as Dr. Van Zandt pointed a video camera at me and took notes.  After most of the responsible students had successfully gotten x alone by completing the square, thus deriving and proving the quadratic formula, I wrote the formula on the board.

“And I also brought a little study guide for you,” I said.  The students watched as I took off the sweater I was wearing, revealing my new green quadratic formula T-shirt underneath.  Dr. Van Zandt’s camera captured all of it, including the students’ reactions as they laughed and cheered.

“Where’d you get that, Mr. Dennison?” Andy Rawlings shouted out.

“I went to a conference this weekend.  They were selling math shirts.”

“I love it!”

I wore the quadratic formula shirt many times the rest of that year, and the students all seemed to react positively to it.  Once I wore it to Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, and a younger university student saw it and said, “The quadratic formula!  I remember that from high school!”  His response puzzled me; as a mathematics major, the quadratic formula was not something to be remembered in the distant past and forgotten, but something fundamental to the way the universe worked.  I supposed that many people did not see it that way, though.

I went to the Shorehaven conference a total of twelve times from 1998 through 2014.  I  made the walk from the conference grounds to Cypress Middle School at some point every time I went, because that was such a beautiful, peaceful place to take a walk, with all the trees surrounding the conference grounds, and the waves breaking on the adjacent beach.  I have not been in over a decade at this point; the other mathematics teachers at my current place of employment usually do not go, and the school district only sends instructional coaches to that conference.  I did go to the adjacent beach once since then, in 2024 while driving around with my mother on a visit home.  I may return to the conference someday, though; I still have well over a decade ahead of me before retirement.

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Readers: Is there an annual event, work- or school-related or otherwise, that you attend every year, or attended every year for a long time? Tell me about it in the comments.

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