Trying to keep this alive.
Gentle Readers,
Hey! Remember me?
I'm waiting for some software to update so I figured I'd use this time productively to post something. The last 2 weekends I did kinda the same thing. I did a presentation about the evolution of German singlehanded swordplay first at Kingdom A&S and then at Forward into the Past. In both cases it went really well.
At A&S I was presenting to judges. I got immediate feedback but it was all "You did great. I have no suggestions for how you could be better." While this was nice, it was also little frustrating for 2 reasons. Firstly I wanted some feedback so I could improve for when I was presenting to the public at FITP. Given that there were people who were very active in presentation and public speaking judging me I was really expecting something a bit more critical. The second thing was that given the lack of criticism I was quite disappointed that I did not win my category. Given that they saw nothing wrong its hard to know what to do better. A tiny part of me wishes I had judged one of my peers more harshly since he was the one who beat me (conflict of interest? HA!).
The following weekend did the same presentation at FITP and there I had an actual classroom with a projector for the slides as well as a target to poke with the swords. Overall things went really well there. I had no technical issues. The biggest problem was the audience. It was all young men, some in trench coats, some with neck beards (ok, plus my one awesome friend). Having been one of them (well, without the neck beard), I understand their reaction but the fact that no one (but my friend) laughed at my jokes really disappointed me. Even the Longsword/d8 joke fell flat. The only thing that got a chuckle out of them was when I said it was ok to laugh at my jokes.
A couple of them seemed incapable of expressing enjoyment of any sort and glared at me through the entire presentation.
Very strange.
Thankfully though the feedback was good with no complaints so, they did like it even if they weren't capable of expressing that.
I'm not sure if I managed to learn anything from this other than perhaps that I need better jokes.
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.
Hey! Remember me?
I'm waiting for some software to update so I figured I'd use this time productively to post something. The last 2 weekends I did kinda the same thing. I did a presentation about the evolution of German singlehanded swordplay first at Kingdom A&S and then at Forward into the Past. In both cases it went really well.
At A&S I was presenting to judges. I got immediate feedback but it was all "You did great. I have no suggestions for how you could be better." While this was nice, it was also little frustrating for 2 reasons. Firstly I wanted some feedback so I could improve for when I was presenting to the public at FITP. Given that there were people who were very active in presentation and public speaking judging me I was really expecting something a bit more critical. The second thing was that given the lack of criticism I was quite disappointed that I did not win my category. Given that they saw nothing wrong its hard to know what to do better. A tiny part of me wishes I had judged one of my peers more harshly since he was the one who beat me (conflict of interest? HA!).
The following weekend did the same presentation at FITP and there I had an actual classroom with a projector for the slides as well as a target to poke with the swords. Overall things went really well there. I had no technical issues. The biggest problem was the audience. It was all young men, some in trench coats, some with neck beards (ok, plus my one awesome friend). Having been one of them (well, without the neck beard), I understand their reaction but the fact that no one (but my friend) laughed at my jokes really disappointed me. Even the Longsword/d8 joke fell flat. The only thing that got a chuckle out of them was when I said it was ok to laugh at my jokes.
A couple of them seemed incapable of expressing enjoyment of any sort and glared at me through the entire presentation.
Very strange.
Thankfully though the feedback was good with no complaints so, they did like it even if they weren't capable of expressing that.
I'm not sure if I managed to learn anything from this other than perhaps that I need better jokes.
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.