So evaluation done, 2 days to go. I had a great sleep and woke up around 10ish, I think. A good 10+ hours to catchup. I opened my phone and was somewhat bombarded by emails. It turned out that there had been a minor incident involving an Australian team the night before that I had completely missed. But it has been handled and everything was under control. Dylan had been around and able to assist which was helpful.
I showered, which I hadn’t had time to do on Friday and had a breakfast / lunch snack of pop-tart coffee and mussel bar. Healthy, maybe not, but it was great! The I headed over to the variety show auditions. As my share of the evaluating was done I was scheduled to help out with these. The variety show is great fun it has to be made up of teams of people from at least 2 affiliates and they do music, jokes. magic tricks anything entertaining. I was only there for the second half of the auditions, but there were some excellent one and some good ones. In the end everybody who auditioned made it into the show. Lynn worked on the show order and Janet and I got the seating and movement sorted out, then headed back to North as the FPS choir started practicing.
I had a bit of a break and rest before I headed down to the campus centre to buy an early dinner. I had to be back at the variety show for setup at 6 so I had an early dinner before I waited in the lobby to see if there was a lift. There wasn’t but I did run into Dylan. He came with me as I drove to the variety show and filled be in on the details of the minor issue from the night before. It turned out that everything was under control.
The variety shows was fantastic, it was so encouraging to see kids from different affiliates working together to produce acts to entertain each other. The logistics didn’t work quite as we planned, but it was nothing noticeable that affected the show. All the acts were enjoyabel. My second favourite wasn’t really an act, but one of the co-ordinators Lynn did a parody of I’ve Been Everywhere Man on the Ukulele, adapted to IC and the variety show it was funny & very well done. The key refrain being ‘we’re from everywhere man’ and she worked the affiliates in remarkably well. But my hand down favourite was two girls from Connecticut and Illinois. They’ve performed together in the variety show since they met and this year they did a duet of Breaking Free from High School Musical and it almost as good as the original. I don’t have a video of they’re performance but I’ve embedded the original below for you’re viewing please. I’ll leave that there and come back to the rest of Saturday in another post.
This is the third post involving evaluating. Sorry, it was a big part of my role at IC. This one should be a bit shorter.
So about 5.00 I got an email with round 2 assignment. They way they do it is get an evaluator to make a whole step of the top x number of booklets in the division so they get another whole evaluation. I was given step 1 juniors, which is probably one of the longer steps. I think there were 17 booklets for me to mark. They were due at 10pm. I was hoping to make it to the CmPS fair, but time wasn’t looking like my friend and unfortunately I didn’t make it.
I got through 1 and bit booklets, trying to be a bit nicer as they were Juniors and then it was 6 and time for dinner. I realised that I’m really going to have to pick these up if I want to get them done. So I got dinner and ate and as I marked trying to race. I got it down to about 10 – 15 minutes a booklet which was tight but should let me finish in time. I was very tired by this point, but got into a rhythm working quickly and got them finished around 10. By the time I was done I got my second wind and wasn’t especially tired anymore.
I went down and chatted to Emily and ran into Dylan on the way and we got some data entry jobs. First, we stopped into Brenda & Cyd’s (other / retired ADs) who always do a big cook up for people staying in North. I had completely forgotten and foolishly eaten dinner – there was SO MUCH food. Next time I’ll definitely skip dinner and plan to spend more time there to hang out with others.
So Dylan and I did our data entry, then he had to go off. I did a bit more data entry, then Emily didn’t have any more jobs and I decided sleep was overdue. So Evaluation (for me done) and after having about 3.5 hours sleep since Thursday morning at 11.30pm, Friday night I went to be. And that’s it for evaluation. It was a new experience and fun albeit a lot of work. Not a lot of sleep, but that’s manageable for one night.
Note the title should be read as ‘evaluation is greater than sleep’ not ‘evaluation leads to / then sleep’!
TL;DR: No pretty pictures in this one. If you don’t care about FPS evaluation you can probably skip this post. There was a lot of evaluating and I barely slept.
So 6.00 comes we grab dinner and get ready, then it’s time for shout-outs. This was something that had come up, but a foreign concept to me as it’s something we’ve never done in Australia. Basically, it’s how UPs are scored, and suspect ones checked and IC (and apparently some other affiliates). I was evaluating middle teams, so I was with the group of middle evaluators. We paired off and started scoring UPs. There was a lot of them. For each UP you marked the structure and focus and adequacy. Turns out we were just supposed to categorise focus & adequacy A – E which gives you a range of scores, but Andrew and I accidentally gave them real numbers, but it didn’t matter much. These may or may not be UPs in your bundle but the idea is that all the UPs are scored before you start evaluating. Anything you think is dodgy or flawed you and your partner have to discuss with another group. Then all the results are put in to a spreadsheet and scanned so you know how to make all your UPs. It works, but it is a long process. Middle, as the biggest group were the last to finish, so it was after 9.30pm before we could actually get to evaluating. The evaluations were due at 12.00 on Friday so I had about 14 hours. (but I wanted to sleep in there somewhere right?)
Sorry, that was a long paragraph! At the meeting earlier we had been told that our bundles would be at most 8 booklets (for teams) and probably less for the individuals, apparently most booklets had 6 or 7. I didn’t find out til later (as we were still waiting for some international booklets to come in) but I had 8 middle team booklets and 7 individual senior booklets. Chatting to other evaluators it sounds like I managed to get two of the biggest bundles. So 14 hours, 15 booklets and middle or senior teams so they generally write a bit and at IC you don’t expect many blanks. Also, different eval guidelines and you do write comments at IC unlike the Australia finals. It was shaping up to be a ‘fun’ night. I usually have a glass of red wine with my evaluating in Australia and I expected I was going to miss it by the time the night was over. I was right.
So I got cracking, but I started slow. I was tired, comments take time and apart from my certification this was my first time using FPSOnline. I’m so glad I had my iPad, because a lot of booklets were traditional so just a PDF and being able to have the booklet and evaluation open at the same time was essential. By about 1am a hit a wall but I had about 12 booklets to go so sleep didn’t look likely. In the end I dozed for about 2 hours, in my chair, with a blanket wrapped around me. When I woke the inevitability of the approaching deadline motivated me along with cups of coffee, tea and sparkling water. I finished the team booklets at about 11.30, 30 minutes before they were due. I went downstairs to find we’d be given a hour extension! I grabbed some lunch and went and got started on my senior individuals. There were due at 2, moved to 3. Sure, individuals are quicker, but just over 3 hours was going to be a stretch but I worked fast and with a few short breaks finished at 3.10 – not too bad. After that I was exhausted. Evaluation wasn’t over but it would be a few hours before we would be ready to start again.
I had a chance for a break so I walked down to the student centre and got a coffee. It was good to stretch my legs, see the sunlight, get some fresh air. Oh and the caffeine was fantastic! So, we’re at Friday afternoon. That’s enough for this post and I’m slowly catch up to today. (Finally enough, not much happened in isolation so they will be short posts!)