Image: Keven Law
There have been a lot of interesting posts floating about of late either about plenaries at ELT conferences, or actually linking to videos of them.
This reminded me of another (in a long series, I guess) confession I ought to make on this blog...
PLENARIES QUITE OFTEN SEND ME TO SLEEP
Now, before you chortle, I want you to consider that I actually find this a fairly serious problem. Even the really great presenters with genuinely interesting subject material eventually have me nodding off at some stage during proceedings, while the really ordinary ones can have me doing Stevie Wonder moves in my chair (and the fatal chin plunges -- you know, where your chin slips off your propped up palm?) within about 10 minutes.
This almost never happens in workshops or presentations with smaller groups of people, mind you. Which leads me to believe this might be a condition that has stuck with me since my university days, when anything taking place in a lecture hall would have about an 80% chance of sending me to sleep.
What is (perhaps only vaguely, to some) interesting here is that I recently started nodding off while watching a video of an ELT plenary event. This was actually a first, but the narcoleptic symptoms started in each case eerily close to the segments of the video where I found myself watching rows of teachers in chairs, sitting dead still and staring straight ahead while a single voice droned on in the distance.
Oh, and by the way, the video in question was not the one of Lindsay Clandfield I posted about yesterday!
Does anyone else out there in ELT suffer from the same or similar condition?
Is there a cure available?
(This reminds me of a discussion I once had with a fellow presenter at an ELT event, where we came up with the idea of having a publishing person with a taser gun ready to zap anyone rude enough to fall asleep in our presentations, but we ended up concluding that it might be a whole lot more effective to have the presenter tasered instead...)
=D
