Despite the fact that we have “the summer off” as chemical educators, many of us have been quite busy this summer. Some teaching summer school, some traveling to refresh their minds, and a large group of people who participated in a summer conference (or two.) This summer was pretty full for me with two conferences and two meetings, of course if you add the zoom meetings the count goes up! The Associated Chemistry Teachers of Texas host a biennial conference in even years, which is like a miniature ChemEd; like BCCE, it is filled with all chemistry all the time, but unlike BCCE the sessions are a full hour or two and consist of a lot of classroom ready activities and labs. This year in mid-June we had a focus on phenomena and modeling, but there was a miscellaneous strand for people who wanted more variety. We were delighted to have Jeramy DeBry, from AACT, come visit us and share a session on phenomena! Keep this on in mind if you are pre-college or early college educator; and you don’t have to be from Texas to join the fun. 

In mid-July the American Association of Chemistry Teachers (AACT) held their annual Board of Governors meeting, where new board members, including myself as President-Elect, were introduced. The discussion included various topics regarding the idea of shifting content environments, an update on AACT memberships, and some of the new changes coming to ChemMatters magazine. By the way, did you know that they accept submissions from student writers? 

In late July, many of us convened on the campus of the University of Kentucky for the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education (BCCE). Yours truly hosted a symposium designed to share survival tools for early career chemical educators and shared in the ChemEdX demo symposium. Check out the ChemEdX site when you have a chance – you may find some of the many demonstration write-ups in the next couple of months. In addition to this busy summer of conferences I have been working on reviewing the operations manual for the Executive Committee. Wishing all members of the Division an excellent fall semester!