FENI Day 3: My first and worst teaching experience ever!

Eager
Hopeful
Trepidatious
Nervous
Excited

These were just a few of the words that described my feelings on the third day of FENI. That afternoon I was to teach a 3 hour master class to 13 culinary arts educators how to get socially connected to the world through social networking tools. For the prior two days I’ve had teachers who signed up for my class come up to me expressing how excited they are to see what they will learn. Half of them were in my 2 hour workshop the first night and after getting a taste of what social media can do for them in their classroom, they were eager for more. I had some high expectations to fill. Am I ready?

At FENI, master classes are serious business. These teachers travel from all over the country and some from as far as South Africa to come and attend three classes during a two day period. They pay good money to be here but beyond that, they pay in time devoted to this conference. This isn’t like a local conference where you get up that morning, put on your chef’s coat and go to class for three hours and then go home. Here you spend many days in conference and many more hours traveling to get here. These teachers are committed to excellence!

The idea for me to teach a master class came shortly after I experienced a class gone wrong. In 2009 I took a class at FENI titled “Developing Online Lesson Plans & Curricula” taught by a computer teacher at the Le Cordon Bleu school of Las Vegas. It was one of the worst classes I ever took and I said to myself I could do far better with what I know even though I wasn’t a teacher by trade. All the participants took no value from this class. In 2010 I approached FENI about bringing technology into education and teaching a master class. They accepted my proposal.

In preparation, I wanted to create a workshop that has immense value. I want it to be hands on and not just me lecturing about what they should be doing. That is ineffective, and lends no value to the subject. As a computer guru, the biggest challenge I had was to take all the technical knowledge and information in my brain and translate it into something non digital natives can comprehend. I’ve always been able to bridge the gap from nerd to real world Las Vegas so I had confidence in pulling this one off.

I had so much prepared. In the computer lab I was going to take them through the social network, learn about why it will be important to their lives and why it’s relevant to students. I had planned to get each person to sign up to twitter and setup a group to start communicating to each other during the class. I was to have each person set up their own wiki and start collaborating on a class project. We were to use facebook to setup communication groups, set up events, and make announcements. I had so much planned.

On the day of the class, Chicago was experiencing one of their regular rainy days. It was pouring rain with no end in sight. I pull together all my equipment; laptop, netbook, projector, iPad, mobile internet device, camcorder, camera, pocket flip camera, and headed over to Washburn Culinary Institute’s computer lab.

I get there at 12:30, setup and ate lunch. At 1:45, 15 minutes prior to the start of class, I had two educators enter the room. After a few minutes of priming them for the class, the power suddenly goes off for the entire building. “Oh no, this can’t be happening,” ran through my head. I had planned for every possible problem from lack of computers to lack of internet but no power? How was I suppose to teach a computer class with no power? We sat there hoping it was a temporary power failure.

The fire department arrives 10 minutes later, it turns out that a woman was stuck in the elevator. They had to pull her out from the second floor and it actually turns out to be someone heading up to my class! We all got corralled into the dining room and tried to conduct class in a crowded noisy environment.

Make the best of any given situation… The class must go on. With that I plodded ahead and started discussing the concepts of social networking. I had a laptop with an hour of battery life so I was able to demonstrate Twitter, Wikis and Facebook. We all sat there, 13 of us, huddled around the table making the best of the moment. Despite the problems, they were all very eager to learn and we did make the best of a bad situation.

The busses came early to rescue us, so the class migrated back to the hotel. On the way there, I taught someone how to twitter using my iPad. This 50 year old chef had never done anything like that before and was excited to finally enter the digital age. We relocated to a conference room at the hotel where I set up my projector, screen and continued the class. Unfortunately I had lost a number of participants during this non digital transition to the new location, but six remained so we spent the next hour teaching social media tools. They all stayed past our scheduled class time by half an hour.

We could have stayed there for two more hours but there was the awards ceremony to attend and I had to prepare my super KP raffle engine for tonight’s drawing! That is another story I’m reserving for another blog post. Boy was that a fun hour of compiling 400 entries!

Was that the worst teaching experience ever? I would have to say no. Despite losing power and having my entire plans go to waste, I was still able to salvage the time and make it beneficial to the participants. I could only wish that things would have went better but now I know, under fire, the class can still go on. I only hope that I get another chance to do this again. I really wanted to teach. Really wanted to...