We did it again! Perch brought 8 of our BCBAs to CalABA 2025 in Pasadena, CA. We even met up with our lovely Perch-trained Cassandra who was able to fly in from Hawaii for the event.
I’m still getting used to hybrid conferences and have mixed feelings about the model for professional learning. On one hand, I can take a long lunch break and watch Courtney Tarbox discuss compassionate care from the hotel bar, I can log in days, weeks, or even months later to catch up on talks I didn’t attend in person and still get the CEUs. I can even even sit in my hotel room the entire weekend watching live, collecting CEUs in my birthday suit.
So then, why go at all? Why peel myself out of bed each morning to go see a keynote speaker at 8am when I can watch the same talk at a much more sensible hour from the comfort of my home?
Everyone has different reasons for attending in person. Guessing by some of the fashionistas I see posing on the escalator by Ballroom C, I can safely assume some of those reasons are internet points or clout or whatever. Whatever they are, we should keep reminding ourselves of these reasons we go in person if we want to continue having the opportunity to do so.
Here are my reasons:
The speaker came. They spent years on their research, months on their presentation. They took time from their family and likely spent their own money to travel here to me, to tell me things I want to know, to help me do better.
I learn better in person. When I’m filing in to a tiny room to reserve my ugly upholstered chair, watching as multiple PhDs fail miserably at finding an HDMI port, wondering what that stain is and hoping the guy behind me can figure out his coughing situation, I am paying attention to the right now. When I watch online I am getting up every few minutes to look in my fridge, answer emails, and - yeah click that “I am here” attendance button.
We all need to do better at connecting. This can be an isolating job. As a BT, I would go years without meeting another BT at the same agency and I was lucky if I saw my BCBA once a week. We do much better at Perch now but those old wild west practices are right next door. Even so, as BCBAs, we are often living out of our cars by day and too exhausted to respond to texts from our friends at night.
It isn’t the same. If I watched a Radiohead concert on Youtube and then told people “I saw Radiohead” people would picket outside my house. As Behavior Analysts we understand that so much communication happens outside of our audio and visual perceptions. You just simply haven’t seen Dithu until you’ve seen him live.
We have this joke at Perch, “that’s not in the spirit of wine tasting!’. This is a direct quote from a woman at a winery where we were to do a wine tasting as part of our summer BCBA retreat. I am familiar with their wine and so rather than having tasters I ordered a full glass of the Pinot Noir, their only drinkable red. The woman at the bar clenched her fists and denied my request. Given that I’d already paid, I was quite taken aback by her reaction and even more so when she spat out, “THAT [ordering a glass of wine rather than doing the tasters] is NOT in the spirit of wine tasting!”
So, okay, I think she could have gone about that a lot better and I will still never drink that wine. BUT, maybe this is sort of like that: watching a conference online if you are already at the conference location and/or have the means to be there, is just not in the spirit of CEUing. And maybe I am that crazy lady insisting upon obsolete concepts because I can’t imagine it any other way.
