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!)
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.
The end of the flag ceremony with everybody standing for the US national anthem.
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.
A lot of things from IC won’t mean a lot to many people, moreso if you don’t know what FPS is. So I’ll run through events pretty quickly and just pull out the highlights – you can always ask me if you want to know more 🙂
Wednesday This was slated to be all day training and that’s pretty much what it was. I woke, showered and grabbed breakfast from the campus centre and headed upstair to the (affiliate director) training. Some of it I had already covered so not all the content was new. However, it was great to be able to do it in person with a group of other people, being able to chat, share ideas and see how other affiliates do things was quite valuable. One of the main takeaways was that there are some quite significant differences between Australia and the US affiliates. I won’t go into it here but I will note them down somewhere because they’re worthwhile discussions to have with the australian CoM. During lunch I saw Dylan who came over to say hi and we agreed to catch up later.
Training finished about 4 and I went back to my room to have a brief nap before the appreciation dinner that night. At 6.30 we went back to the campus centre for the appreciation dinner. All the ADs, evaluators, volunteers and IC staff who were on site were there and others who could be with us joined us virtually. We had a yummy Italian dinner, watched some awards for service and participated in a silent and live auction. We raised over $2000 for the FPSPI scholarship fund which was great. I sat with Dylan so got to catch up with him more. We also sat with Anna and her co-chaperone from Kambala. Suz joined in on the livestream and we waved to her. Dylan and I headed back to where we were staying and made plans to go and have breakfast where all the students are eating at Berkshire Dining Commons in the morning.
That’s the end of Wednesday but another random note about where we were staying and I guess this is true for college dorms in general. Suz had warned that there was absolutely nothing there so I had to take my own cup etc with was true. It’s slightly odd but. I know the US college experience is different and the movies / TV shows seem pretty accurate. But it’s still strange to think of the mammoth undertaking to move to college for a year or more like nine months for every year you’re at college. You literally have take everything. I suppose it’s just like your living somewhere for an extended stay, but there’s less amenities that a hotel! Normal for them I guess, bur foreign to our way of culture.
