Monday morning was raining in Vancouver. Luckily, by the time I went outside, it had stopped coming out of the sky, and, though it was cold, it did not rain on me for the rest of the day. I got dressed and walked across to the street to visit Christ Church Cathedral, which is the oldest cathedral in Vancouver. It is a quite beautiful church. It is small but very nice. I took some pictures and left. Matt kept wondering why I was going to church on Monday. LOL

It was finally time to go to the Convention Centre. I snagged a comfortable place on one of the couches and worked on my paper a little bit while I was waiting for Dr. Mitchell. Oh yes, I still had to work on the paper. The discussant from Friday's presentation actually emailed me with some comments and recommendations for the paper (since he'd actually read it). We took some of his suggestions, so I had to make a few changes to the document before getting it ready for publication.

Dr. Mitchell showed up close to the appointed time, and we talked about the paper for a couple of hours. It is kind-of weird. At some point I realized that I am part of it all. I'm not just some student anymore. I'm a real researcher with real things to say. It's a kind-of weird feeling. I've been savoring it for some time now.

Dr. Mitchell went to do some souvenir shopping before going home, so I grabbed a quick lunch and went to another session. This one was on a new commissioned report on Title III. Also, Dr. Kenji Hakuda was the discussant, one of Matt's favorite researchers on bilingual ed. Matt was already at the session when I got there, since I was a few minutes late. The session was interesting but did not really tell me anything new. Also, the researchers did not even acknowledge that Title III has to do with immigrant students and only focused on English language aquisition. So that really just underscored the results of my research, that no one gives a damn about immigrant students and even the research community thinks it's enough just to teach them English. Matt got to shake Dr. Hakuda's hand, so he was all excited about that. I gave my email address to the researchers, so that they could send me the final report and also an older report that discussed distribution of funds. So far, I have not heard from them.

After that session, it was Matt's turn. He was part of a roundtable on charter schools. The room was packed with people and tables, probably 20+ tables in the room. Each table had about 10 people around it, including the presenters. Matt did a good job. I wasn't terribly sold on the other people's research, nor on the moderator, but it was a good discussion. Matt made a good show of it, and was even able to show off his smarts by giving suggestions to the other presenters. Sadly, Dr. Thorson could not be there, due to family issues. So Matt was on his own. But he did just fine.

Afterward, we were feeling triumphant. It was time to celebrate!


We walked back to my hotel to drop off my stuff. While we were there, I remembered that, because of the fire alarm situation from Saturday morning, I had coupons for free drinks from the hotel. Yay for free drinks! :) We decided to check out the hotel restaurant downstairs, which was very fancy and very expensive. But, oh, so good! We ate, talked, drank, and had a very lovely time. At the end of the meal, I surprised Matt by picking up the tab. :)