This past weekend Amy and I attended the 2009 Homeschool Conference and Curriculum Fair, hosted by MACHE (The Minnesota Association of Christian Home Educators). The conference ran over the course of three days and we didn’t even find out about it until the last day. Being conference veterans (she within the pharmaceutical space and me in IT) we were pretty sure we knew what we would be seeing – an exhibit floor with vendors hawking their goods and services, workshops and lectures and a book store where we could browse for books both about homeschooling and for teaching subject matter.
This is how MACHE describes this year’s conference:
For twenty-five years, The Minnesota Association of Christian Home Educators has endeavored to provide information and encouragement to parents who have chosen to home educate. It was formed in 1983 to encourage Christian families in accord with Biblical principles. With our 2009 MACHE Conference and Curriculum Fair, we will culminate our year-long “25th Anniversary Celebration”.
I was initially concerned about the religious angle but the fact is that is something that we will just have to get used to. While our reasons for homeschooling our children are secular, the fact is right now much of the focus of homeschooling is based on religious tenets. I think that is changing, but that’s the way it is now.
The conference wasn’t free, of course, but because we weren’t planning on attending any of the sessions we thought we should be able to at a minimum browse the used book store. And while we didn’t see anything on their website describing a last day pass we had hoped there would be some sort of discount offered to people like us who only intended to browse the expo where the vendors were setup.
When we got to the conference there were plenty of signs telling us we needed to register before we did anything and we ran into a few people who mentioned that we needed to get a pass. “No problem,” I thought “they just need us to register in order to get a badge setup for the vendors to scan our information to send us future information.” But no, I was wrong. They wouldn’t let you do anything without being registered, and for the two of us that would mean $70.
So before spending the money we decided to walk around a little more and visit the used book store they offered. Do you think we would be able to buy some books without paying the conference fee? Nope – no registration, no book shopping. At this point we went back to the registration desk to see if there was a limited pass we could buy but there wasn’t – even though we were there on the last day and simply wanted to buy some material from the vendors on the floor we could not do so without buying a full conference fare.
Now, $70 is not a lot of money for a conference and for participants who went to the sessions over the 3 days this was probably a very good value (actually the pre-conference sessions on the first day each cost $10 but still that is cheap in total).
But it left a bad taste in our mouths. And I’m sorry to say it and I hope I don’t offend anyone here but there was just this real off-putting vibe given off by the “security” guys blocking all the entrances. When I wryly observed to one that it seemed odd I had to pay full conference fare just to buy a used book I was told “that’s the rules, go register” very harshly and I thought quite rudely. What would have been wrong with a “sorry bud, I agree with you but I can’t let you through”? The human walls at the entrances combined with the look of many of the exhibitors and conference participants all added up spelling cult to me. Sorry.
We did get a peek at the exhibition floor from an overhead window and it didn’t look like we missed too much. If I was a vendor working a booth there I would have been pretty disappointed to find out that some of my customers were being turned away because the conference organizers didn’t have the foresight to offer a more granular pricing package for visitors of the conference.
Homeschooling is obviously big business and I am sure there are some secular conferences available. We’ll keep our eyes and ears out for them. But I don’t think we’ll be visiting a MACHE conference in the future.
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