Brian and I are preparing to go the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) conference in August this year. It is held at a medieval castle in Sussex, in the south of England. People in the S-STEP community refer to it as The Castle Conference or just The Castle. I realized that I had not written about past Castles in my personal journal nor my blog, so here is a rundown for posterity. I will begin with the first Castle we attended in 2008. Since conferences are boring, I focus on things we saw and did while we were in Europe ancillary to the conference.
Castle 2008
The first time we went to the Castle, I had just started my
master’s program. Coming to the conference meant that I would miss a week of
classes, which is a lot of class during a summer term, which is already
compressed. It was also the end of the term, so I needed to write my final
papers and finish my homework assignments ahead of time. My professors were not
particularly supportive of my going; they thought it displayed a lack of commitment
to academia. Nevertheless, I determined to go because I had been accepted to
the conference before I was accepted to the master’s program and we had already
paid several non-refundable fees. Our total trip time was 9 days, which is a
very short trip to Europe. We flew from Salt Lake City to JFK in New York with
a short layover and then to England. Our flight arrived at 6 a.m. local time,
which was 11 p.m. our time.
We spent the first day getting over our incredible jetlag,
but we also managed to get in a pretty substantial walk. The second day we
walked around trying to get a mental map of the area. One place we did spend
some time in was the British National Museum, but I do not remember anything I
saw there.
The Castle is in the south of England. It takes about an
hour on a commuter train to get there from London. We arrived on Monday
morning, I presented on Tuesday morning, and then we took a trip to Brighton, a
seaside town on Wednesday. Jane Austen fans recognize Brighton as the place
where Lydia goes to for the summer where she meets and elopes with the evil
Wickham. In Brighton, we walked along the beach and when it started raining, we
went to the X-Files Movie that was playing in a very small, dilapidated
theatre. In the evening, we boarded the commuter train again and traveled back
to the Castle.
Thursday morning the conference ended and we returned to
London. We were in a little better condition by this time. We picked up tickets
for a London Bus that we had purchased online. I was skeptical about whether
this was a good idea but it was quite pleasant riding around the city, getting
on and off the bus when we felt like it. Mostly we just looked at everything
and decided what we might want to go back to if we ever returned. I remember a sense
that I needed to just run my eyes over everything because I might never travel
back to Europe again. I cannot remember where we stayed, but I feel like it was
on the South Bank close to the London Eye/Millennium Wheel. Our return trip
also routed us through JFK, but with a longer layover. We arrived back home in
time to start our teaching contracts—preparing our rooms, going to meetings,
and so forth. I was still very tired when the school year officially began a
week later. This was the most expensive trip even though it was the shortest.
The British Pound was beating the dollar 2:1.
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