There comes a tiredness with having attended a big conference, a sense of exhilarated exhaustion that inevitably catches up to almost all attendees that do not live in the host city.

However, it’s the good kind of “spent”, the kind that comes with having tapped into a host of personal reserves.

For me, the draining derives as a result of a few different things.

1. All the energy inside the conference itself. You can just feel the buzz on Day 1. By Sunday, a great many tanks have been tapped.
2. Trying to attend as many sessions and listen to as many speakers as possible. NCTE starts early (well, not as early as school, but early), ends late (school doesn’t end til holiday/summer breaks – that works knows no boundaries like weekends, night and so on) and is pretty much wall-to-wall. There’s always more stuff to do and see and hear than there are hours in the day and taking advantage of all the goodies is something I always strive to do.
3. All the interactions with people. There are so many keen minds, great spirits, wonderfully generous and thoughtful and dedicated people inside the conference hall that it feels as if you are on non-stop communication bender from the moment your feet touch the ground.
4. The deep thinking. Every part of my thought process abut teaching gets challenged the more immersed I am as a teacher at NCTE. The things I think I believe have their mettle tested, the things I am seeking to learn get pumped full of juice and the things I didn’t even know I needed to know get introduced and expounded upon in a way that makes my brain feel as if it has just spent a heck of a long time at a delicious restaurant… and when I rise from the table, I recognize that, “Wow, I am really full.”

Additionally, for me, as a presenter at these big conferences, I give a lot of energy to my sessions, both in the preparation as well as in the delivery.

I also try and give a lotta love to all my book signings. Plus, I will stay in that chair and sign and sign and sign until every last person has had their book autographed. I mean I can’t tell you how long it’s been a dream of mine to become a professional author and the truth is, I still can’t believe people will wait in line to get my signature in a book so hey, if you are gonna wait, I will, too. (But really, seeing lines snake around the corner all patiently waiting to get a signature or grab a photo with lil’ ol’ me, well… it never gets old, I tell ya that.” And then to learn that Homeboyz sold out all across the conference on Day 1 in the first three hours, well… stuff like that just blows me away. I mean I have no control over how many copies of my books the publishers and sales people will bring to any event but this is now the third year in a row that Homeboyz has been flying off the shelves and I gotta say, it’s deeply gratifying – so if other folks are gonna wait in line, I am gonna sit and sign til midnight if I have to.

At the end of the day, there’s a tiredness that attends to almost any experience in life into which you deeply throw yourself. At NCTE, you work hard, you laugh hard, you play hard, you think hard (often about the people that seem to be hardly thinking when they make educational policy and top-down management decisions) and you push the pedal to the metal.

It creates deep yawns in so many, many people… but they are the satisfying kind that comes from the spirit of honest, hard, genuine, rewarding, meaningful work.

Orlando 2010. NCTE will be 100 years old. Can you say “Off the hook?”

(A special thanks to Carol Jago – though thousands busted their tails to make NCTE 2009 the magical event that it was, did anyone else work harder? You rock, Carol… and you are a gift to all of us!)

I try not to be a hysteric about the demise of our nation’s young men because it’s almost trite to moan about it. And the truth is, I must admit that when I was a “young man” people were most certainly wringing their hands over me.

(Not that they still aren’t but hey, old habits die hard, right? LOL!)

Like all teens, however, I had role models, people who played a large role in my own sense of identity — even though I had never met them. And being that I love sports, I must admit that there were some star athletes who literally shaped the framework of my own self-perception during that era of my life.

Today our young men do much the same thing. This brings me to LeBron James.

Look, I like LeBron. He’s an amazing basketball player, a apparently good-hearted guy and quite an engaging personality.

But last week when his team lost in their quest for the championship he walked off the court without shaking hands with his opponents. Claims he was too much of a competitor to do such a thing.

I saw this in Yahoo sports and just basically had to copy and paste it. LeBron was wrong. This writer excellently explains why.

(NOTE: I can find the source material on this article as I copied it late at night. But these words below are not mine — they are just spot on and well worth repeating — so I pinched them from the article, and I’d gladly credit the writer if I knew where I got it from.)

“I’m a competitor,” LeBron said. “That’s what I do. It doesn’t make sense to me to go over and shake somebody’s hand.”

But so many athletes are now cut from that cloth. They think the inability to deal with defeat gracefully is a sign of competitive fire, when it’s often a sign of immaturity. A real competitor gives every ounce of effort to win, but is enough of a man to give respect to an opponent who does the same and prevails.

How dead-on is this writer? I just love this line…

They think the inability to deal with defeat gracefully is a sign of competitive fire, when it’s often a sign of immaturity. A real competitor gives every ounce of effort to win, but is enough of a man to give respect to an opponent who does the same and prevails.

Whereas the spirit of competition, the nobility and the passion for sport, used to be the driving force behind the games (well, at least in Greek times), now, the game is all about who wins as if the means justify the ends. (See Dick Cheney and the torture argument for how this twisted thinking extrapolates into warped perceptions during adulthood.)

Are our young men more adrift than they were when I was a kid or am I just more attuned to what is a constant adriftness in young men during this era of their lives now that I am a bit more long in the tooth?

I’d be lying if I did not acknowledge being troubled by the stuff that is going on these days with young men. I mean, holy friggin’ smokes, earlier in the week I had a student tell me she was sexually assaulted by 3 boys on our campus. Now when I was a teen, I was most certainly a hell-raiser. But rape? Gimme a break. My moral compass might have been askew but it hadn’t been completely amputated from my conscience.

What is up these days? And more importantly, is there anything more I/we can to to help fix it.