I just spent five of the most amazing days of my life at “Twitter Math Camp 2012” or #TMC12.  I have been anxious to blog about it since I came home.  However, I have also been simply overwhelmed with all that it was.  I doubt that I can convey to any reader the enormity of this experience, or how much it has changed me and help me grow as a teacher.  I feel like the best way for interested teachers to get a true sense of what  #TMC12 really was about, is to read all of our posted experiences and quilt them together (links to other blogs at end).

When trying to explain this conference to my non-teaching friends, I tell them.  “Think about the best teachers that you ever had.  Put them all in one room.  Ask them to all tell you their best ideas and strategies.  Listen in awe.  Take tons of notes.  Learn from the best.”  This was a meeting of the most creative, innovative, and inspired educators that I have ever been privileged enough to know.  Everything said this week was important, and relevant, and will directly help me with my students this year.  In fact, I will be lucky if I can even try out a fourth of the things that I leaned about at Twitter Math Camp.  These teachers are doing amazing things in the classroom.

How was I lucky enough to be part of this?  I am an impassioned educator who loves to talk about teaching math, all the time.  Just ask my family, I drive them crazy.  Thankfully, I found a bevy of great folks on Twitter to talk about teaching math, 24/7.  Since I found them a couple of years ago, we have talked practically non-stop about teaching math, planned lessons together, given each other great ideas, participated in book studies, and generally just supported each other through the thick and thin of teaching.  I love to talk to them because they love to teach as much, if not more, than I do.  They are always working, planning, wondering, and thinking up new ideas for their students and their classrooms.  They are all brilliant, and fun to talk to as well!  So much fun in fact, that we all started talking about getting together, to meet, in real life.  It started out almost like a joke, and I pushed hard for a cruise.  I even made a wiki page for the cruise!  But, time passed and we went back to our crazy, hectic, teacher lives.  At least until two amazing teachers, Lisa and Shelli, actually decided to do something about it.  Thus, #TMC12 was born.

I have been to multiple conferences in my many years of teaching.  This was by far the best PD (professional development) that I have ever attended.  What made #TMC12 so much different, so much better?  The key was that this was a teacher’s conference, by us, for us.  We knew what we needed.  We cut straight to the point in our presentations.  There was no wasted time.  I appreciated that and really felt like these amazing teachers are my people.  They understand me and knew what I needed.  They don’t think I am weird for wanting to talk about teaching all the time.  They can’t wait to discuss a great idea as well.  And we never stopped talking about teaching.  We talked about it over breakfast, all day long, at lunch, dinner, and even when we were hanging out at night.  And we had so much fun at night!  After a whole day of cramming our brains full or math and teaching ideas, we loved hanging out together even more at night.  But we never tired of talking about teaching!  We could be in the middle of a song, have an idea, and stop singing to talk about it immediately.  One verse later, we would jump right back in to singing (or dancing) again.  We even talked about education up until the very last minute, when we waited, together, for our departing flights in the airport.  Education was our undercurrent.

I learned more in these 5 days that I have in a year of reading blogs.  At the end of each session, poor Lisa had to cut us off.  We were so excited about each presenters ideas that we would have talked for hours.  My educational highlights for the week included:

• Talking about how students learn, developing new lesson ideas, and learning new ways to present slope with the Math 1 folks.
• Learning about many more uses for whiteboards. (Mistake camp).
• Daily Favorite Things sessions (which will continue through the year via blogs – YEAH!)
• Developing ideas for how video can be used to improve the classroom instead of just  “flipping” it.
• Collaborating post-session with multiple teachers about the best way to represent integer subtraction.
• Many side conversations about homework
• Giving ownership back to the students including numerous ways to get students talking about math and working together in math class.
• Interactive Notebook Nirvana
• Meeting people (not related to me), that had actually read my blog.
• Discovering (in the airport) that even teachers I greatly admire wonder if they are good teachers.  It made me feel so much better about my teaching and my failures.
• Technology, technology, technology.  I may never even have a chance to try all of the amazing new websites that I learned about!  I wish I had taken better notes (thanks Rachel).
• Math club collaboration
• Marshmallow guns shoot much harder (and farther) than you think.
• Having FUN in presentations with the presenters (even if it was off topic or off color sometimes) 
• Jinx Tweets!  When people would think about the same thing, at the same time, and tweet it.  It was unreal how much this happened.  Our brains work alike.

My personal highlights:

• Bonding with people immediately even though I was so nervous about going and talking to people I had never met IRL.
• Finally meeting everyone that I had been tweeting for years with and discovering that they were all exactly like their tweets!
• Just that feeling that you have when you are surrounded by people that totally get you, and still like you, for who you REALLY are.  
• Doing “The Squirm” with my math class song mentor, Sean.  He even offered to write me a song for my class (love).  
• Finding several other teachers that wear their purse cross body, on the right side.
• Making stupid jokes that people laughed at bc they have my same weird sense of humor.
• Feeling comfortable being as loud as I wanted to be.  (Thank you all for putting up with me).
• Having an enormous group of people who also sing at random just because they hear two words that makes them think of a song. (Actually, having tons of people who would just sing with me, at random, whenever I started singing.  I didn’t even have to ASK!)
• Going around in a giant group – EVERYWHERE.  
• Square dancing on the sidewalk in the middle of lunch just because we thought of it.
• Teaching a movie theater full of people to dance before a movie – and everyone did since my friends were all into it.
• A whole world of people that are as obsessed with office supply stores as I am!  
• Dressing up like Sam 
• Getting less sleep than I did in college because I never wanted to stop talking to these amazing people about math and teaching!
• Generally just being around people that are CRAZY fun, more crazy fun than I ever thought people could be.
• TWEET ME MAYBE! (thanks for the extra credit Sean)

Things Most Frequently Heard at #TMC12

• “Can you blog about that?”
• “Can you put that on the wiki?”
• “PINTEREST!”
• “My phone is dead.”

My only regret was that even though I stretched every day to the limit, I did not have enough time to talk in depth with all of the people that I wanted to talk to.  Everywhere I looked fascinating conversations were happening all around me.  It was almost impossible not to get completely immersed and remember to move around.  I’ll definitely be coming back to #TMC13 to pick up where I left off.

I felt like I was with people that “got me”.  And I loved that many of the Twitter Math Campers even thought the way that I did.   In fact, if I said (rather sang) this blog post title out loud (TMC – People Just LIke Me!), I now know a few people, IN REAL LIFE, who would sing, “You’re down with OPP, Ya you know me!” in their heads, if not OUT LOUD, with me.  They are smart, fun, quirky, real, and down to earth people who truly care about other people and are willing to sacrifice fame and fortune to change the world.  They care about education, they are serious about their jobs, and they love their students.  They are an amazing group of math teachers.

If you are a math teacher out there who wants MORE, then I implore you to explore Twitter and start reading blogs. We will help (Twitter/Blog newbie website coming soon)!  In fact, if you don’t tweet, you should definitely read the words to this song that Sean, Rachel, Sam, Dave, and Bowman wrote at #TMC12.  It should resonate with you.  We want to help you!  So, “Tweet Me Maybe” at @jreulbach!