Opening Ceremony, Evaluation begins.

Thursday

I woke up bright and early – in hindsight more sleep probably would have been a good idea! I was very glad for my car, because it was raining and neither the breakfast location or the opening ceremony venue were close by. Dylan and I headed to breakfast at Berkshire Dining Commons where all the teams eat. Admittedly, it was the morning of the competition, so numbers weren’t super reliable but it did feel smaller, in so much as 800 students can feel small. I think it was the comparative factor that we noticed, from the normal 2,500 students 800 feels a lot smaller. I noticed this at other events like the ceremonies & variety show, it was harder to judge ’round the grounds’ as most of my time was spend evaluating. I managed to see Anna at breakfast and pass most of the Australia flags to her for her students.

Dylan had to be at the opening ceremony early, as he was managing flags. This gave me almost 2 hours to wait, most of which I spend sitting in my car reading while it was raining. The opening ceremony was standard, not too long or boring and they keynote speaker was interesting, which is always good. As always, see the flag ceremony with all the participants is great, and standing for all the national anthems and national flags.

After that, competition was about to start for the students, and the hard work of evaluation was about to start for a bunch of us. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, sure I’ve had a lot of experience at national finals but I’ve never been an evaluator at IC before. So different experience and I had to remember that we were evaluating using IC guidelines, not Australian. Also, all evaluation via the FPS online system would be new.

So first up, the evaluation meeting. We had lunch together and talked through the plan, read the FS discussed it a little bit, so far so good, similar to Australia. Then we hit UPs. Discussion was, um, lets go with vigorous and long. Not bad, but intense. We had a lot of discussion , were given sample UPs to score on our tables and had more discussion it turns out that marking UPs is a much more collaborative effort at IC. I’m not sure if it’s as consistent as Australia, but that’s probably not possible given the number of booklets. I think it is balance and varied and I’ll explain more of the process when we get there. After this, it was go back and rest up until dinner and ‘shout-outs’ started at 6pm. So I had a hour & and half nap (very worthwhile!) and killed a bit of time.

Thursday’s not over, but I think I’ll try and handle most of the evaluating in one chunk, so that’s the next post.