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Wednesday, I made a presentation …
… to some young ladies of Holy Family Academy. (Frau Reinke’s alma mater) Two groups 40 minutes each. 25 in group 1; 40 in group 2. Each group had two teachers as chaperones and the Library Lady listened to both. (Guess that was to monitor discipline. If you’ve read my book, you know there is always “discipline”.)
In exchanging emails with the powers that be, it became apparent that they wanted “guest speakers” and the topic of my book was of interest to them.
So, hey, I’m always up for some “fun”.
The essence of the spiel was “I did it. I published a book. And, you can do it too.”
I connected them to Frau Reinke by their school. I told how Frau Reinke told me to “do it or shudup!” Lovingly. I related about a day dreaming grade schooler. Early mornings, 5k words/day, and some of the challenges. Went thru the technology, step by step. (The second group actually wanted that repeated during the Q&A.) Riffed off the line about 197X FireFox kids doing it WITHOUT technology. And, challenged them to some things they could do.
It was interesting that three of the TEACHERS got really excited about the possibilities.
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After action report:
It wasn’t “fun”. It was tough. I guess it’s part of learning to deal with the “ouchie”.
It was difficult because I’ve never “performed” in front of an audience this young. And, as you know, I’m an ITSJ. So, that’s ALWAYS a problem. (Had to be extra careful that any “injineering” language didn’t slip out.)
It was interesting in that the children as NOT as “computer literate” as I would have expected. Most had never heard of an RSS feed out of FACEBOOK.
First group (high school freshman), I needed the filler: SFYG and the Burqa. Second group (English honors juniors and seniors), were more into “novel” and how to do it. We got into Burqa, “digital dirt”, and, then, into a repeat of the EXACT steps to move data from FACEBOOK to a book. The Principal had to call time because they were getting into the gory details.
(The Principal complemented my on my ability to take them as deep as they wanted to go and explaining it such that she could understand it. :-) The essence of a fat old white guy injineer is to make sure you use little words and speak slowly.)
In retrospect, I gave them the rough stats on copies published. Last time I checked. To one significant digit. I could have given them the exact numbers but I didn’t think that was a big deal. In retrospect, I probably should have given them exact. The zeros make a bad impression. Argh! Now I feel bad.
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The library had “brag books”. Evidently, each student had to put together a book of what they accomplished at HFA.
(I call it a “brag book” because I recommended something similar to my “turkeys” when they were doing “job search”.)
A lot of it was format stuff and some filler. But, in the forms they had, there was a self assessment. Leadership, speaking ability, yada, yada, yada. Rows of the stuff; maybe 20 rows? With four columns for grading. “Outstanding”, “excellent”, “good”, and “needs improvement”. I looked at more than 20 of them — I was killing a half hour — there was no one who “needs improvement”. I thought that was funny. Funny ha ha!
Now I recognize that if I’d have had to do one in high school. It would have been very very thin with accomplishments.
But, I’d have known I needed a lot of “improvement”. (Luckily, a young lady came along in my sophomore year of college and helped me “improve”.)
SO here we have 20 or so brag books, and NO ONE needs improvement?
That’s a failure.
I saw cheerleaders, Irish Dancers, Eucharistic Ministers, Drama Queens, … …
I didn’t see any Engineers, Scientists, or such …
I didn’t see any athletes …
I did laugh that many claimed that “marching in the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade” was an achievement. That sounded like filler to me.
Robert Byrnes cited “the gift to see ourselves as others see us”. Sounds like these teachers and students need some eyeglasses.
Everyone always “needs improvement”.
Even me.
That’s why I don’t take such tests.
Frau Reinke left that job unfinished!
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Posted by reinkefj 
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