The stuff of nightmares – but what’s yours?

Next week it’s the IATEFL conference, the annual getting-together of our ‘tribe’, one that pre-dates (but includes) the twitter folk (aka PLN). It is always god to see so many friends and colleagues in one place.

And of course it means presenting again – in various guises I’ll be doing that at least 3 times in Liverpool. And though I’ve done it hundreds of times before, the nerves never go away – of course. And neither do the nightmares.

Nightmares? Well yes. I have a series of ‘presentation’ nightmares! Three nights ago, for example, I found that my ‘audience’ for some reason had split into three rooms – that’s after I had noticed that they weren’t really paying attention to me. And when I went into one room they (the teachers) seemed to be involved in a  karaoke session and wouldn’t stop! They wouldn’t even listen to me! Me!!!

Once I had a nightmare about how I was talking away, losing confidence, so I turned my back on the teachers – it seemed to be in a room I had once presented in in Serbia – but/and when I turned round again almost all of the audience had vanished.

And then there’s the one (which recurs quite a lot) where we are some big conference and someone introduces me and explains what I am going to talk about and I stand up….and then have absolutely no idea what to say about the topic, and all the people are looking me expectantly…

I guess we all have nightmares which have something to do with the things that we do, and the fear of looking like a fool comes to some of us in some dreamlike form or other. I once knew someone who used to have hideous dreams about being in a reception line for the Queen wearing only her boots and a hat!

Then there’s the nightmare about publishers going crazily all-out digital and making people redundant all over the place and focusing only on a corporate-driven view of client satisfaction (the two are not compatible by the way).

Oh wait. That’s not a dream, that’s reality. So it doesn’t belong in this blog post. I’d better continue….

Not all my dreams are nightmares, of course. I had one which had an incredible farewell song in it so I had to write it down and record it.

But the presentation nightmares are part of my life, it seems, and even if/when I stop presenting (if I ever do) they’ll probably stick around.  Personally I wish they’d go away, but maybe they are part of the presentation ‘furniture’

Do you have presentation/teaching nightmares that you feel like sharing?

Go on! You know you want to!

Of fingernails, gliders, guitars and glue – a new ZPD?

For a couple of months now I’ve been thinking about something that happened to me (or rather didn’t happen), and trying to pin down why it worried me so. Well not worried in a BIG way, but enough to keep me pondering.

I’d better explain.

Recently I have started playing the guitar and singing in public again – after a break of…..well let’s say quite a few years. True I’d done a bit of this before (2 songs at an IATEFL ‘come and sing’ evening I ran with Adrian Underhill a few years back, and a song in the Touchable Dreams show I do with Steve Bingham). But they weren’t happy experiences. My right hand shook and it was clear I’d lost ‘it’ in some way or other. But then, for reasons which are not interesting for this account, I started to get ‘it’ back – I started to want it once more – and so I practised and practised, bought a new guitar and began to think I could perform again.

And then, In June 2011 I agreed to do three guitar-based shows (in three different countries) during a trip I would be doing a month later (this was on top of the usual language-teaching talks I do). I felt very brave making the decision to sign up for these shows, and incredibly scared. But also invigorated in a way, because that’s what ‘moving out of the comfort zone’ does for you –  taking risks, going that one bit further. I used to do a teacher development talk about this, and based the whole session on going gliding for the first time. It seemed a good metaphor; flying right outside the comfort zone to produce a feeling of total euphoria and learn more about yourself. Surely teaching should be like that too, I argued.

About to leave the comfort zone – that’s Christoph the instructor!

In a sense all teachers leave the comfort zone every time they meet a new class or teach a brand new lesson, but deciding to do those shows in South America (I hope you are following!) seemed a little more than that. A real risk. An exciting and terrifying risk.

But – and you don’t really want to know this, but it’s necessary  – I have a problem with my finger nails. They keep breaking. And that’s not good if you are a finger-picking guitarist. So I asked guitar virtuoso Jason Carter for advice, and he recommended false nails and glue as well as having my nails painted with acrylic paint to strengthen them. I found a nail beauty clinic in Cambridge (where I live) and made an appointment (for the acrylic painting). The next day, therefore, I turned up and stood outside the glass-fronted salon. It was full of women. Only women. I couldn’t see a counter or a reception area. I wouldn’t know which of the women to talk to. I walked towards the open door. Some of the women saw me, a strange-looking man loitering outside a beauty clinic. I thought: I should go in now and say ‘I have an eleven o’clock appointment. Can anyone help me?’ But I couldn’t do it. I walked away from the window and thought about it. Turned back. Tried to walk into that clinic again. And then I lost my nerve and like some loser, returned to the car and drove home, chastened and ridiculous.

It’s been false nails and glue since then (thank you Jason). They seem to work more or less.

But the experience got me thinking. Why didn’t I have the nerve to enter that nail clinic, that women-only world? Surely the situation was a classic ‘out of the comfort zone’ experience I should, based on my own talk, have relished. But it wasn’t, and the only thing I can think of was that it was TOO uncomfortable, an uncomfort zone too far, so far out of the zone that I could not cross that threshold (yes I know it was ridiculous; I’ve said that already!)

And so, perhaps, it might be time for a new kind of zone, a ZCPD, a zone of comfortable proximal development. The formula might go something like this: the best way to develop – as a teacher or anything else – is to move out of the comfort zone BUT NOT TOO FAR – or at least only when you are ready for it. Maybe THAT would be an easier concept to sell than the one-time bungee-jumping, glider-flight, nail clinic kind of terror that could be a step too far.

What do you think? Does the concept of a ZCPD do it for you??!!

Why I walked out – but would you?

Yesterday I walked out in the middle of someone’s conference session. In the scale of events that is hardly significant in any way, so don’t hold the front page (!) but as a serial conference goer and presenter it has been worrying me for the last 24 hours – and since I tweeted the anger that caused me to do this it seems only right to muse on why it happened.

This was the situation: Marc Prensky (who describes himself in his bio data as ‘an internationally acclaimed speaker, writer,, futurist, visionary and inventor in the critical areas of education and learning’) was on stage sitting there with four students (aged 15-16) and their teacher. The conference was the 2010 ABCI conference. ABCI is the Brazilian association of Cultura Institutes of which there are many all over this wonderful country (there are Cultura institutes all over Latin America). Marc Prensky (he’s the guy who invented the digital native/immigrant duality), the teacher and the students, were in front of 700 teachers, all of whom work at one of the Culturas in Brazil.

Prensky questioned the students hoping they would prove his point that all teenagers are wired into a new kind of digital world. It was nice to hear these children (all of whom study at a Cultura here) talk in their excellent English, though it was difficult to see who or what they were representative of. They were , after all, just four teenagers. They didn’t give him much of what he wanted, I suspect, though they were obviously IT literate, but that’s another matter. The whole thing made me feel mildly uneasy. But they seemed like nice kids.

At one point he asked the students what they liked best about being Cultura students and one of them said it was the e-board (he was probably very pleased about that). And then he said ‘so what are the things you don’t like so much about the Culturas? What would you like to do differently? What are the negative things? Come on! This is your chance to give good feedback to all these people’. Four teenagers asked, encouraged, in public, to criticise the 700 adults sitting in front of them. I was not sure I had heard it correctly. But I had.

My response? No one who has any dealings with teenagers in an educational field should or could ask such a question in such a forum. It was, it seems to me, grotesque in what he was asking the kids to do. It made me mad. I was about to voice my protest. Stand up and heckle. Luckily, however, wisdom suggested otherwise. I walked out and tweeted furiously instead. It’s only the second time I’ve done that in quite a long time. Walk out I mean (and I do try, normally, not be a negative tweeter). The last time was when a very famous plenarist spoke with such a lack of engagement and with such an obvious disdain for the act of presenting and his audience that I slipped out of the door I was next to rather than let my anger show.

Why is it worth talking about this? Apart from my angry tweet nobody (least of all Marc Prensky), noticed.

Or did he? I did a plenary here this morning. The same 700 teachers were there. One guy walked out half way through (was he angry with me?) and I noticed. Wim Wenders once made a film called ‘The goalkeeper’s fear of the penalty’. Perhaps there should be a movie called ‘The presenter’s fear of people walking out’.

It’s because (as a speaker) you ALWAYS notice when people walk out in your talks that I try never to do it myself when I am in an audience. I am not (I tell myself sanctimoniously) like one ELT author at this conference who often just gets up and leaves when he finds the speaker boring. At least I don’t think I am. I can’t be 100% certain.

But what about you? Do you think I was right to walk out? Do you walk out of talks? If so how does it feel, and what is the kind of thing that makes you vote with your feet? I’d love to know.

On being nervous

Once again, my dream of blogging ‘what-makes-a-good-presentation’ has been superseded by a conversation I had, and an experience I, er, experienced. But this little post IS all about presenting and performing, so perhaps that’s OK….

The conversation first: I was talking to someone who had been at a British Council conference in Beijing. She was talking about how nervous she felt when she asked a question and made a comment from the ‘audience’– much more nervous than when she herself presents.

My experience? I narrated a fabulous kids’ story called ‘Ferdinand the Bull’ (for solo violin and narrator) at a packed family concert in Ely, UK yesterday. The star of this event was actually my violinist friend Steve Bingham who played like an angel. All I had to do was to read the words so that the kids and the mums and the dads would enjoy it and laugh. It seemed to go well, but my legs were actually shaking and I had to hold on to a music stand on the stage to try and disguise it. The kids laughed at the story, the mums and dads loved it, and my voice and arms (when I had the nerve to let go of that stand) worked really well. So why on earth was I having the leg problem – a problem that more or less disappeared when I narrated the next, much more difficult longer piece a few minutes later?

All of this has got me thinking about what it is that makes us nervous – about what it feels like to present, to perform. For like my British Council conference-goer friend, I too have been really nervous when intervening ‘from the floor’, and felt shaky when I have done so. As an amateur musician, too, my bowing arm used to shake when I started playing the viola in an orchestra I wasn’t really good enough to join. And recently, when, considerably more experienced as a viola player, I played in a big concert (viola, by the way = orchestra workhorse who no one usually pays much attention to) I got the shakes again when I saw friends of mine (who are not at all knowledgeable about music and instrumental playing) in the front row.

I have had panic attacks too as a presenter. Sometimes the audience seems to ‘get away from you’ and you find yourself talking into a vacuum and have no idea how to get back in touch with them. It’s a frightening experience – and only made even worse when (as has happened to me a couple of times) your mind goes completely blank and you have no idea what you are talking about.

Everyone gets nervous about something. What surprises me (and confuses me, because I don’t understand it in the slightest) is how arbitrary it seems, and how sometimes, when you feel nervous because you are about to do a plenary to two or thee thousand people, those nerves only make you a better presenter whereas at other times your voice or your legs or arms (or any other bits) suddenly seem to get out of control. Weird or what?

Of course you CAN did something about it. Beta blockers stop your wrist shaking when you play a bowed instrument, I have found, and I’m going to see if they deal with the leg problem too! But surely, relying on drugs isn’t the answer. There MUST be better ways of dealing with all this. Or rather there must be ways of making nerves a positive experience always, rather than physically debilitating.

This is a complex area, perhaps. I wonder how much it is related to ‘Essential Tremor’, a condition that some people very close to me suffer from and about which my now deceased brother-in-law (himself a sufferer) wrote a great book. Sufferers from ET shake more or less all the time, but shake more when put in awkward situations. Some of them can control it through sheer will power, some use drugs or alcohol.

I don’t really have answers to any of this. Nor do my experiences equate in any way to people who are disadvantaged by shaking (e.g. ET sufferers). And anyway, I enjoy performing; I acted through school and university, deriving great pleasure from it; I sang happily in folk clubs and other venues for years; I love being asked to narrate or lead public events; I really enjoy giving talks at teaching conferences (when they go well!!), and most of the time I feel really comfortable ‘up there’. But sometimes, just sometimes the nerves, instead of having a good, positive effect, are ‘bad’ and screw you up.

What can be done (what do you do) about the ‘bad nerves’? Can/should you drug yourself out of them? Can/should you ‘image’ your way out of them? Ignore them? Find things to hold on to?

I am guessing that many people reading this blog post have suffered from nerves too. So what is it, for you, that makes nerves a disadvantage and what have you done about it? Over to you.