Test, Allies and Enemies (II)

Well it went well. It was actually the first time I’d presented day one of the conference so as a result it became the first conference I’d ever presented at where I’d not been at least slightly hungover or drunk from the night before, so I’d taken that as a bad omen.

However, a wicked revelation provided a good omen.

My first state conference presentation, I borrowed my mate’s watch to time. It was an analogue watch that didn’t have the numbers written on it, and as a result, I placed it on the podium upside down. It meant that I rushed the last half hour into 15 minutes, thinking I’d finished a quarter hour late, yet I’d finished a quarter hour early.

At my first national conference I relied on a mate to time me. At one stage I looked up and asked him how long I had. He held up three fingers. I had 12-odd slides to get through. I was sure I had time it better than that. So I rushed through, finished what I thought was 15 minutes late and then looked up to see a crowd of confused faces. My mate looked at me and said: “This finishes at 1 o’clock, right?” It didn't. It finished at 1:30.

He still owes me a beer for that.

At this, my first international conference, I arrived, checked in and was told by my colleague that I had been allotted a 90 minute slot. I’d prepared for 45 minutes.

Bugger.

Went well though. Lots of questions, lots of compliments. The only downside was that I’d forgotten to bring copies of Worlds Next Door. It was the book I wasn’t selling.

Let me explain. When I write a speech I need a hook – something that would let the piece flow. Apparently some people let their work speak for itself, however that’s for people with something to say. This speech after weeks of aching, it came to me. Since I was talking about Bugs, Buffy and Santa’s Giant Sack, I would plug the two books that I’d been published in: Buffy in the Classroom and Worlds Next Door, all the while claiming I wouldn’t plug them.

Not exactly The Parrot Sketch, I admit, but it was finally something.

And so, since Worlds Next Door was a small time press from WA, I thought I’d do them a favour a take over a dozen copies to sell. At the end of the speech 6 people asked me for copies, or which I had none – I’d left them in my damn hotel room. The next two and half days saw me lugging around a bag with them in, but no luck. No approaches. So sorry, Tehani.

Another slight problem was my inability to load up handouts to my wiki page. This conference was the first I’ve seen where they’ve truly embraced web2.0. All presenters were encouraged to maintain a wiki page, and then all attendees were given the opportunity to tweet their experiences. It wasn’t utilised as much as it could or should have been, but it was a great idea. Firefox couldn’t upload stuff, and Safari just wouldn’t. There was no way I was going to download Explorer to upload one thing. (Fight the Power! He says while typing away in MSWord on an Apple MacBook Pro while listening to music via the iPod on his iPhone.)

So I’ll try to upload them here.

And my next post will be about the conference itself.

The sphinx

Rejoice!

Apparently bureaucracy works! The Queensland College of teaching maintains high standards by occasioanlly firing people. Or at least that's what this article says.

Pffft.

WACOT had better not use this as 'evidence'.

The hydra

An article defending the use of cursive writing.

Even though it appears to have been discreditted, someone is trying to defend it. Their arguments appear to be:

• people won't be able to read old documents
• handwriting will be easy to forge
• that's pretty much it.

Legibility is apparently not a concern.

Tests, Allies and Enemies (I)

Yeah, it’s been hard.

I did predict that this would be an infrequently update blog mainly due to my Head of Year job, but bloody hell! I’m busier than a one-armed bee in Baghdad (See? Even my metaphors are becoming nonsensical.) I mean I did try. Every single day sheet of my diary had “update blog” on it.

In fact my to-do list had to be split into 3: high (urgency), mid (urgency), low (urgency) and long term. Unfortunately, “update blog” never made it past low urgency.

Especially since there was another entry that took prominence. “Write conference speech” started as long term, made its way to low, then mid, and then when I flipped over my Dexter Calendar to April and discovered just how little time I had to the conference, I skipped straight past high urgency, threw aside my diary and tried concentrating on that.

Still didn’t help.

I skipped the first rehearsal (in front of a regularly meeting group of friends who include two teachers, one minister and a professional comedian, since I wasn’t finished, but at least made it to my second rehearsal at school with five minutes to spare.

And I got it done. I’m looking to place my Keynote onto one of those websites which display PowerPoints, even though since I use these displays as punch-lines to jokes, it’ll be pretty nonsensical. Its clarity is further impeded by the challenge I’ve been set to place a zombie slide and Michael Ironside’s utterance of “It sucked his brains out!” from Starship Troopers into every presentation I do. (I was quite proud of my science teachers’ presentation.)

I’ll let you know how the conference and the speech went.