At a recent Hokkaido JALT meeting I told the story of my first presentation. In the spring of 1999 I was finishing up the Interim Year Teaching Practicum of my MA in TESOL at the School for International Training. I’d kind of forgotten that I’d sent this in as part of one of my reports. The lessons I learned from that experience have become part of my presentation “prep” routine. Here’s an excerpt of the report that I wrote about that experience 8 years ago.
…One reason why I’m so tired is because of the action research project that I’m doing in my pronunciation class and the JALT presentation that I did about it on Sunday. If those who attended my presentation learned half of what I learned that day, then I’ll be satisfied. My first thought about it is that it could've been worse—I could've really fainted, instead of almost fainting. It was probably the longest 45 minutes of my life. I started out all right, if a little nervous. But there were about 35-40+ people in the room and after about 10 minutes I felt like I didn't know what I was saying and I wasn't making very much sense. That's about when the room suddenly got very hot (the classrooms at the international school where the conference was held are on the west side, the sun was shining brightly and the windows were closed due to the sports day at the school next door). [2007 Addendum: the rooms were actually on the east side, but it was a warm and sunny day!]
I wasn’t focusing very well (both verbally and ocularly) and started to see wavy lines in my field of vision. So, I stopped and said something like, "I'm feeling very hot and I'm going to open the door." Which I did, but the door to the hallway didn't let any breeze in so a couple of people helped me to open the blinds and windows. I also had to sit down for a while and continued talking from my chair. When I felt a little better I stood up and when I started feeling whoozy again I sat down. People were very sweet and asked questions and made comments, which helped a lot.
After attending two other presentations, I went to a friend’s house and broke down – literally crying on her shoulder for several minutes. We went for a long walk and she talked me through what had happened. This was just a few hours later, but there were gaps in what I remembered, even then. Who asked what question when? When did I talk about this point? Most of it was, and still is, a blur. But as we were walking I was already thinking about things to do differently in my next presentation. That’s the blessing of being in the experiential learning cycle. Every experience can be a learning experience (but if you don’t go out and put into practice what you’ve learned, does that mean that you haven’t learned it?)
Some of the things I learned are:
• Have someone there for support.
I did everything on my own, including spending 30 minutes that morning making copies of my handout at the local convenience store (the copy machine got clogged up because I tried to copy on both sides of the paper), getting nervous, and giving out handouts to latecomers. It was too much to handle by myself.
• Have everything that I'm going to say on one piece of paper.
Next time I’ll enlarge the handout and write in the margins. I had to keep going back and forth between my note cards and the handout to make sure that what I was saying corresponded to what was on the handout.
• Do a run-through and think through the whole presentation.
I ran out of time to do this. I was going to talk through it with a friend on Saturday night but was so exhausted that I didn't have the energy. I hadn’t taken any time to think about what it would be like to be in front of a group of people in this situation, talking and being “the expert.” It’s much different than being in front of a class of 50 students or even giving a chapel talk to 100+ students and teachers.
• Have everything finished and ready two days before the presentation.
To be fair to myself, I didn’t have much time to prepare a lot beforehand. I was working until the last minute because that’s when I had the time to work on it. I was quite tired and probably hadn’t eaten enough that morning, due to nerves. But, next time I’ll make a plan of what needs to get done and when to do it and try to leave plenty of free time before the presentation itself.
• Find ways to work out my anxiety before the presentation!
I kept downplaying it when anyone would ask me if I was nervous. Next time I'm going to say, "yes, I’m nervous because..." and then do something about it.
• Make sure the title of the presentation accurately describes the content.
In the conference program my presentation was called "Large-class Pronunciation and Listening", the second part "an Action Research Project in Progress" was left off. All the questions and comments pertained to pronunciation and none to the AR cycle. I’m afraid that people attended expecting activities for teaching pronunciation in large classes and not an introduction to the AR cycle. I think that the abstract I wrote up accurately described the presentation, but titles tend to stick in people’s minds.
• Check out the room as soon as possible and make sure that everything is in place.
The room was really warm, even after having been empty for a long lunch break. Airing it out after the previous presentation would’ve helped a lot.
After the conference was over a friend of a friend (who hadn't attended my presentation) asked if I would be willing to do a workshop in October on using songs and music to teach pronunciation at GEOS’s in-house conference. (GEOS is the language school where she works.) I tentatively said yes. I’ve got to get right back on that horse again and put into practice what I did learn, right? [2007 Addendum: this was quite ironic for me because I had interviewed for a job with GEOS in Canada before I moved to Japan and didn’t get it. 8 years later I did a presentation at their conference. Life is fun like that.]
The feedback I got after the presentation, and from some co-workers on Monday, was generally pretty good (or perhaps just kind), but rather vague, along the lines of “It was interesting.” I’m not sure if I could’ve handled more than that anyway. It was a huge learning experience…. It also keeps me humble, realistic in my goals, and appreciative of those people who often give presentations and make it look so easy. Not everything is going to be easy the first time I do it and new challenges are necessary to keep life interesting and to keep growing and learning. My next presentation is going to be a lot better because I have identified very concrete ways to make it better.
A post-script to this section: On Wednesday evening one of my fellow night program teachers called me a “syllable genius” (or something equally flattering). He had attended my presentation and so received the “Haiku Syllable Count” activity and tried it out in one of his classes. He said that it had worked really well. [2007 Addendum: This same teacher still tells me when he’s going to use the activity he got from that workshop. Another lesson – taking the time to tell someone that they appreciate and use what they’ve shared with you is always a good idea. So, I try to do that too. Thanks, B!]
Monday, April 30, 2007
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