So I had a group presentation this week.  Was it stressful?  Only a little bit, but that’s because we were trying to fit a lot of presentations into a time frame that barely fits them.  So when both groups go over a little bit and I’m watching the seconds tick by then it does get to me a little.  I definitely prefer a well structured presentation where everything has defined time limits and you can track it with a timer.  Having open ended audience participation is tricky to time, and though it was great to watch the group before me work their way through a difficult topic, and do an excellent job of it, I was still stress inducing as I saw our “to finish on time we need to be speaking here” point come and go.

The presentation itself went great!  All my co-presenters were amazing and did their parts ridiculously well.  I have only had to do a few group presentations during my Political Science degree, and none of them were what I would call a fun part of the class.  Some people were up for slacking off, a few were close to graduating and had stopped caring, very few wanted to actually make the presentation something solid.  So I often picked up the slack because that’s how I work.  This time around I had three co-presenters who were not only motivated to make the presentation a good one, but were actually concerned about how we can make it better, even up to the last minutes before the presentation started.  I am very unused to this, and am hoping this drive carries over to everyone else in the program that I have the honour of doing group projects with.  

That said, I’m not entirely sure how group presentations and group teaching units is preparing us for teaching.  From my limited experience there are not a lot of occasions like this where several people work together to create a class.  Nor would I expect to be limited to teaching for 7.5 minutes of a class.  So its good entry level experience, but still not quite preparing me for diving into the real world of teaching.  Am I complaining, no.  I trust the folks at UVic know what they are doing, and I’m quite sure that they have built a program that works.  I just need to wrap my head around the fact the program that I am in is slightly different than what I had expected it to be, and really dig into the observation and practicum classes as opportunities to learn the teaching aspect of the program.

Ending the week of class was the EdCamp put on by Valerie and Luke of my 336 class (hi!).  I again had little idea what was actually going to happen here, but went in super pumped.  There were a few topics I was quite interested in learning more about, but sadly some never really happened.  I spent the first bit of the class hanging out in the live story telling room, but after deciding that I was going to be the only person in the room for a while I jumped out and went off to one of the other rooms that had a handful of people in it.  This worked great, and we had some great discussions about Google Classroom and some of the other platforms that are available.  But Peter (I forget his last name) was the only person experienced in the areas when I joined the room.  So it was sort of him fielding a bunch of questions and not so much of a round table discussion.  The next room I jumped into was much the same.  There was a handful of students, but no one that actually knew anything about the topic.  So it was not a really productive room.  I moved into another that had some experienced people, and a group of students from UBC.  This one, including people in the classroom setting, was really interesting as we were able to discuss the workings of having people with different learning needs in a classroom.  Sometimes a teacher can figure out how to best support and reach the students, sometimes they can’t, and having a good relationship with the EAs in the school can go a long way towards connecting with some of these students.  

EdCamp was a great experience though.  I feel like it could have used a moderator to set the tone of some of the rooms.  Mostly just to prevent a handful of students from showing up together and not having any idea what’s going on.  I still have no idea what the live story telling room was going to be about.  It may have also helped to have someone assigned to each room as when one room started to end the participants usually just went off to one of the larger rooms causing them to kind of snowball in size.  But that’s just speculation on my part.  I had a grand time, picked up some new bits of knowledge, and got the chance to learn a little bit about how UBC’s program works (its all pass / fail for example).