If you would like a terrific view of the Manhattan skyline take yourself to the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn and hie over to the East River Ferry about 20 minutes before dawn. There to your right, at about 50 degrees is the Chrysler Bldg; at 30 degrees the Empire State Bldg; at 320 the new World Trade Center obscured by some smoke stacks.

The first ferry was headed to Wall Street. I looked to see if the brokers were nervous. The market is mostly up, but New York is about to lose its jillionaire Wall-Street-brother-in-arms Mr. Bloomberg. He's been mayor for 50 terms, I think, but now he's leaving and his Democratic replacement (the GOP guy hasn't a chance according to the polls) shocked everybody by announcing that he'd like to charge rent to charter schools. Bloomberg did everything but personally clean the urinals at charters during his term. They stayed rent free in public school buildings. Often if you entered a six story school structure in the city you'd find that the first and second floor belonged to The Friendship Academy Charter School or some such. The upper floors were P.S. 56. Guess who got the library.
The conference is being held at the Museum of Mathematics, 26th and Madison. A clever idea. Many of the talks will center on math education, of course, but I see enough other stuff in the program to keep me interested.

I got to the conference after a refreshing 20 minute walk. The keynote speaker was a math professor from Old Dominion, Dr. Adam. He's a popularizer of math, meaning he tells jokes and shows pictures of beautiful geometric patterns from nature. I couldn't follow everything he said but he did tell us about some interesting websites where people post nice pictures: search for OPOD, EPOD, and APOD. The last one is astronomy pictures. In the question period after his talk he noted that, with his own students he aims to hear one say, "I saw this neat thing today that I never noticed before." The true beginning of education.
I then went to a presentation by a Mills College professor, Linda Kroll, a sort of general intro to constructivism. We explored the museum and then sat down intermittently to discuss our own reactions to what we saw. She noted that one of her students had come up with an acronym designed to teach people what constructivism is:
S = social
A = active
I = integrated (not just one area of study at a time)
L = learner centered
E = empowering
R = reflective, relevant

All good, but too general to persuade anyone who'd never heard of this. Who hasn't been to a teaching lecture where they told us we were supposed to create lessons like those?
Social? my kids are too social; they don't use their interactions for my kind of learning
Active?  they are active, and I try to get them to be active, but how to prevent over-activity is the problem.
Integrated? try that with a pacing guide
Learner centered? They are already too self centered
Empowering? obviously a problem sometimes with teens
Reflective? Not a forte for 14 year olds.

But I still think this is the way to go rather than passive, non-social, confining lectures or teacher-centered classrooms. Someday I'll figure out how to do it. Just before I retire.