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.

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.

A Brief Side-Sojourn (If that's grammatically correct)

My proposal to the state conference committee:

A Geek’s Guide to teaching Lit

Never before permitted

To interact with the glory-icon that is Lit,

The Geek of renown faces the daunting task

Of bringing down the epic-course to his level.

How will someone steeped in culture that is Pop

Face the Grendel of the canon?

Will the journey of this devotee of enchanted pictures

End in sorrow or triumph?

(And exactly how the hell did he justify teaching Buffy in a Lit course?)

A little much you think?

Yeah, well, what ya gonna do about it?

12:22

I've just re-read my last post, when I only had 3 little girls and that slimy little four-eyed arse-licking republic-stealing bastard was still in charge.

My how times have changed since then. The blog was an original attempt to try to keep up some semblance of writing skills, dedicating an hour a day to writing. It went almost as fast as my daily jog (Blog: three days; Jog: two days). I actually feel sorry for that dude who commented on my second entry. I can only imagine they've been waiting two years for a reply. I'll get around to that eventually.

I guess the topic of this blog should really be the reason why I've suddenly come back to the blog-writing fold. It's actually three-fold.

1) Hypocrisy can only go so far (see my last post). Making my Year 12 students blog, and then commenting on them doesn't really seem terribly fair. Particularly since the whole purpose of getting my kiddies to keep blogs is to help improve their writing skills in a public forum, in a real life situation. Improvement through embarrassment, if you will - a proven teaching tactic. Let them have a go at me if they will. I need to keep my writing skills up, and this seems to be the best thing for me to do. So, if any of my kiddies are reading this, have at thee. Or at me. Or whatever. Since the last few years I've been some devoid of writing ideas I may as well keep my writing skills up by electronic metaphorical regurgitation. Which leads into point #2:

2) I've written a short story. Four years since I last wrote a short story and one comes to me while on retreat. Well, not really come to me as if a bolt, but kinda crept up on me. A friend of mine is putting together a collection of spec fic for tweenage kiddies. Couldn't think of anything until I recalled a really bad Santa joke. I started on it, and finished two drafts in three days. So kewl. What was best it reminded me of what it feels like to write, and more importantly, complete something. And she seems to like it, which means I might finally get published something that I like. She's also the one who's been on my back for a while now about not finding time to write (her professional opinion: "get over it, princess"). Of course, if my story isn't up to her standards, I'll just guilt her into publishing it.

3) Just got back from a National English teacher's conference. Brilliant stuff. Of course, that's only if you're an English teacher yourself. If not - I can't imagine anything more dull (except for the conference that was there after us - professional turf growers. Seriously.) and after seeing them dance at the conference dinner, I have to say English teachers could be the most white profession ever. For anyone who hasn't been to any kind of conference, unless you're pissed all the time (which happens more often than you'd care to admit) delegates have a tendency to be inspired and reminded why you're in the profession in the first place. Unfortunately, when you return to the real world, reality gets in the way of improving everyting you promised yourself you would do. So I'm here, in at work, justifying the time I would be going back over the notes by wriyting this blog to try to get it straight in my head (which, by the looks of that meandering previous sentence, is going to be a lot more difficult than I hoped for).

The last speaker consolidated a theme which I wasn't really sure permeated throughout the conference until I had it spelt out for me in the final session. The guy was called Jeffrey Wilhelm, one of a number of American experts flown in (because as we all know, nothing is important until an American expert is flown in). His speech meandered a bit, but I was most impressed by what he had to say about teaching as a profession - it's not.

As in, teaching can't be considered a profession until teachers start acting as professionals. He put up a bunch of definitions and qualities of professionals and pointed out (depressingly accurately) that we are letting all those qualities be taken away from us by legislators. He says that all teachers need to be researchers in their own classrooms, and we all need to be activists. That which you would normally whinge about, actually write someone about it. That which you are having trouble teaching, experiment and ask for assessment from the kiddies. More work, yes, but not much and the results could hopefully improve your teaching.

12:51

And so I find myself back here. An hour of writing appears to be out of my reach first entry back, but I'm sure I'll build up to the hour once I find the time but I feel I need an outlet for ideas, statements and general whinging, even if only it is on a blog to begin with. First ideas get sorted out here, sent to message boards, typed up, sent out, discussed at conferences.

Might work.

But at least I'll feel I'm doing something.

As long as I keep at least doing this.

Man, I always suck at endings.