The Keynote Presenter

My last posting was about some of the diverse audiences I have addressed. This posting is about no audiences. Because of the pandemic created by the COVID-19 virus, six presentations that were to have occurred in March and April were canceled. They will be rescheduled at a later date or as virtual presentations. I was supposed to speak in San Francisco on April 15 but that will now be a ZOOM presentation. I have used ZOOM before to speak to classes at various universities, so it should not be a problem.

The one benefit of the pandemic is there is a lot of new material for a presentation I am scheduled to make at the New York Chautauqua and the Fountain Park (IN) Chautauqua this summer. The presentation title is “The History of Toilet Paper and SUCH!” We had agreed to this topic last summer. It is now a very timely topic. The photo below is just one example of the new material that will be added to this presentation. And yes, corn cobs have been used as toilet paper in the past.

One of the interesting things about being a speaker is the diversity of the audiences to which I speak and the diversity of the locations where I speak. Today I spoke to a group of 4-H agents who work in the Northeast section of North Carolina. This group is relatively young. The topic was about balancing work and family and we met in the Farmers Market Building in Rocky Mount, NC. That facility doesn’t get much use at this time of the year.

Last week I spoke in the Memory-Care Unit of the Rosewood Health Care facility which is a part of The Cyprus Retirement Community. We met in the Activity Center and most of the audience sat in wheelchairs or on walkers. The Rosewood schedules a variety of activities designed to enhance and maintain cognitive processes. I spoke about Rosenwald Schools and was pleased with the amount of interaction I had with this audience.

These two groups were very different.

I don’t know if there is a real Margaritaville but I spent the weekend at the Margaritaville Lake Resort in Missouri on the Lake of the Ozarks. The occasion was the state meeting of the Missouri Farm Bureau’s Young Farmer and Ranchers Conference. There were over 500 people in attendance. It was a real treat to interact with the future of American agriculture. My keynote address was “Live Like You Were Dying: Balancing Work and Family.”

I rolled out a new presentation recently titled “Outhouses, Privies, and Toilets of the World.” Whenever you debut a new presentation you have fingers crossed in hopes it will go well. And it did. I was extremely pleased with the reaction of the audience at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. I was a little concerned because the subject matter was a little on the gross side at times. However, I did balance that with humor; so it worked. I focused on India, Nigeria, Bolivia, ancient Rome, medieval Europe and ended up with the high tech toilets of Japan. I even wore one of my Nigerian shirts to set the mood.

Last year when I spoke at TALENTS in Kentucky, the snow and ice made getting to Georgetown, KY treacherous. This year it was pushing 70 degrees. A nice change.

TALENTS — Teachers As Leaders:  Empowering New Thinking Skills is sponsored by the Kentucky Association for Career and Technical Education with support from the Kentucky Department of Education Office of Career and Technical Education. It is designed as a leadership program for classroom Career and Technical Education teachers. The goals are excellence in the classroom, leadership at school, and advocacy within the community.

I made two presentations to the group. The first was on using Assessments to Improve Teaching and the second was on Becoming a 2nd Mile Leader. I also had the opportunity to work with a group of beginning CTE teachers in the inaugural “Surviving to Thriving” program. My presentation to this group was “Finding Your Way: Searching for the Wizard of Oz in the CTE Classroom.”

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.