The Keynote Presenter

I was expecting perhaps 5-10 people would show up for my 8 AM Saturday morning presentation titled “No Regrets: Balancing Work and Family. After all, this was the last day of the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE) Conference and I knew people would be worn out and who wants to get up to attend an 8 AM session? Well, I was pleasantly surprised at the attendance.

It was a good week in Anaheim (Dec. 4-7, 2019). This was my fourth presentation. Earlier in the week I had made the same presentation to the National Association of Agricultural Educators (NAAE) and had a great crowd. Dr. Wendy Warner and I also made a presentation to the NAAE titled ” Making the History of FFA Come Alive .” We had people sitting on the floor for that presentation. We had a great time and I exhibited some of my FFA and NFA artifacts.

Perhaps the most fun (and eye-opening) presentation was to the Board of Directors of ACTE. It was titled “Controlled Chaos: Everything You Need to Know About Parliamentary Procedure But Didn’t Know to Ask.” This was a basic workshop on Parliamentary Procedure. Toward the end of my presentation, the folks were divided into two teams and we had a short mock meeting where the teams had to conduct some basic business. You could tell who in the group of officers had backgrounds in Agricultural Education!

My latest round of presentations took me to Nigeria. The administration of the Federal College of Animal Health and Production Technology in Vom, Nigeria decided that all of the 150 faculty should have mandatory training in how to teach. So I was asked to do the training. The faculty were divided into two groups and I spent a week (November 12 – 22) with each group. It was a challenge using technology in my workshops because the electricity would go off 3-4 times a day. Fortunately, the college had a standby generator that would come on when the electricity went out. The faculty were very courteous and truly wanted to improve their teaching. It was a pleasure to work with them. I even created a web site for the training if you want to check it out – agteaching.wordpress.ncsu.edu. What was impressive was that the Provost and Deputy Provost of the College participated in the training. This is setting an example for the faculty.

There was a receptive audience at the Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning at North Carolina State University on Monday of this week to learn about “How Boy’s Corn Clubs and Girl’s Tomato Clubs Changed Rural America.” The audience asked some great questions but what was neat was that folks in the audience were from every county or state I mentioned in the presentation. I was especially glad there was a person from Macoupin County, Illinois who could pronounce the name of the county.

Speaking at the New York Chautauqua Institution is great way to close out the summer. But if you speak at both the New York Chautauqua and at the Lakeside Chautauqua in Ohio, that is double the pleasure, double the fun.

My presentation at the New York Chautauqua on August 16 was about Circuit Rider Preachers: True Stories. I then traveled to Lakeside, Ohio over the weekend and made four consecutive presentations on four days (Aug. 19-22) at the Lakeside Chautauqua. The general theme for the week was religion and culture during the 1800s. I spoke about camp meetings, circuit rider preachers, the traveling Chautauqua, and finished with the history of the outhouse. I did some exploring and found three outhouses on the Lakeside Chautauqua grounds. That surprised a lot of people.

At Lakeside I got to ride in a classic wooden boat on Lake Erie and hung out with the Guy’s Club whose motto is “We’re Workin’ on It.”

The Chautauqua Institute in New York likes to brag about how an opera, ballet, play or some other creative activity was first developed and showcased at Chautauqua before it premiered on Broadway, at Carnegie Hall, etc. I reversed that process this past week. I presented “Circuit Rider Preachers: True Stories” to an attentive audience at the Cardinal in Raleigh last week. So now I am ready to present it at Chautauqua in New York this coming Friday.

As a speaker, you always feel good when the audience has to be “shoo-ed” from the room. That is what happened at the Cardinal. The program host finally had to cut off the discussion to remind the audience it was time to go to dinner.

I am sort of tired. On Monday I made two workshop presentations (teaching with humor, time management for ag teachers) in Roanoke, Virginia for the Virginia Agricultural Teachers Association. On Tuesday my luncheon keynote presentation was Searching for the Wizard of Oz. As soon as I finished I jumped in the car and drove the three hours back to Raleigh so I could grab a flight to Springfield, Missouri. I arrived at midnight.

On Wednesday I did a workshop for the Missouri ag teachers on how to make the teaching of FFA information exciting. Today (Thursday) I made a keynote presentation titled Live Like You Were Dying: Balancing Work and Family

After the conference ended, I made my way to the Springfield National Cemetery to pay my respects to Jack Williams. While I don’t know Jack, I know about him. He was a former FFA member from Arkansas who was killed in World War II. He was a Medal of Honor recipient and was featured in one of my Friday Footnotes.

Looking forward to getting back in North Carolina late on Friday.

It was a pleasure speaking at the Fountain Park Chautauqua in Remington, Indiana earlier this week. This permanent Chautauqua was established in 1895 and is one of few Chautauquas in the nation that did not close during the great depression or during the World Wars. My presentation was about the tent or circuit Chautauquas that crisscrossed the country in the early 1900s and how they brought culture to agriCULTURE. There were at least 75 circuit and stationary Chautauquas operating in Indiana between 1907 and 1932.

To get a flavor of what it was like to be at an early Fountain Park Chautauqua I chose to stay at the hotel that was built in 1898. In hasn’t changed much since the early days except for the addition of indoor bathroom facilities. There is no air-conditioning, internet, television, etc. The rooms are pretty much like they were in the beginning. Below are pictures of the hotel and the room I stayed in.

I always enjoy making the “Give Me That Old Time Religion: Camp Meetings” presentation. Yesterday, I delivered this talk to the Cardinal at North Hills community. As part of the presentation I circulated my collection of hand held fans used at camp meetings and communion tokens that were required at some camp meetings before one could participate in the Lord’s Supper. The photo above is of a Camp Meeting tabernacle (looks like a barn to me) in Kentucky. In 1904 they had a serious drought in this community, met to pray for rain, and it starting raining. They have been meeting every since and it is said that it always rains during camp meeting.

I enjoyed speaking to 50 high school minority students about opportunities in agriculture this past Monday. Often minorities have negative views about agriculture and are not aware that agriculture is much more than farming. For this presentation, I identified a number of minority agriculture faculty at NCSU and at other universities and described what they do. I learned a lot about my colleagues and hope the students did also.

I enjoyed speaking at the Master Gardener College on the North Carolina State University Campus last week. The title of my presentation was Growing Plants, Growing People: Land Grant Colleges, the Extension Service, and Master Gardeners. The presentation was basically a history lesson on how land-grant colleges, the Extension Service and the Master Gardener program evolved. The Master Gardener program started in the 1970s in Washington State. The two Extension specialists who started it had both studied in Germany and learned that Germans bestow titles for hard‐earned proficiency levels in various crafts. The top proficiency level in horticulture is denoted by “Gartenmeister,” which they anglicized as “Master Gardener. And the rest is history.