I’ve attended the Festival of Education 2015! In the run up my thoughts were:
“What the hell am I doing? I’m not a teacher, student or official education anybody! Don’t even know what I want to do in education! How can I even introduce myself?!”
So I packed my bags (and my confidence) but by the time I’d dragged myself through London and arrived at the train station, I was looking like crap, hungry and needing a shower. The last thing I wanted was conversation with a stranger, and yet…
The other person at the train station was a teacher trainer. She had an upcoming training session for new teachers and so I talked about what I know: that it’s possible to rapidly learn loads about teaching and education by following teacher blogs.
In conversation it became clear that my time in the education blogosphere had given me knowledge that even those who opt for a career in teaching don’t have, so I said; “If you’d like, I’ll easily put together an eGuide on blogging for your training session.”
“Sure!” She said, possibly thinking that I’d not follow through. The day after the event she got an email with my eGuide. Her reply:
You’ll never forget the fist time someone genuinely thanks you for sharing your knowledge.
Inside formal education we’re judged on our knowledge. In the real world, if you’ve got your eyes open for the right person and the right need, you’ll be thanked for it :D
For the rest of the conference I introduced myself as an ‘expert in teacher blogging’ which began some really fun conversations :P Someone else even introduced me to a friend as an ‘expert’ so people wanted my advice AND I had answers, it was easy!
Ultimately ‘teacher blogging’ is not the direction my work has gone, but by just pretending this was my ‘thing’ for those few days, my worries about being alone and ignored at such a big Festival all disappeared. That was all I needed.
UPDATE: Festival of Education 2016 presenter slot…
Alongside my self-published author friend we’ll be talking about creating a living and I’ll even perform a poem…
