When I was a boy, my mother decided that my health would benefit from naturally therapeutic supplements.  She decided upon a concoction based, I believe, on the following equation: a substance’s nutritional and antioxidant value rises in direct proportion to its difficulty to ingest without gagging.  The result of this formulaic search turned up a brew foul enough to sterilize a person who’d had their tongue removed prior to quaffing the draught.

I’ll not name the product, but here’s a hint: I’m pretty sure that it was created by scraping the topsoil from a never-before-cleaned dog kennel, liquefying that in a blender, then carefully folding in charred bits of lemon peal, linoleum, and bone (likely human).  If you taste it, you’ll know (and hopefully this knowledge will not have left you blind).

Now,while I maintain to this day that the only benefit I gained from exposure to this noxious material was a built up immunity to radioactive waste, there are plenty of nasty medicines out there that are good for you while being no fun whatsoever to take.  This is, I think, the best way to describe my presentations at the Idaho conference two days ago: I think the event benefited me, but it wasn’t much fun to go through.

Without going into too much detail, let me say that I misjudged my ability to talk over the heads of some educators despite the fact that I have little formal training in education and pedagogy.  I spent weeks researching my topics to substantiate my claims (teaching narrative literacy by killing the canon and teaching metacognition by writing fiction) in the belief that educators would demand such theoretical underpinning to even consider listening to my proposals.  When I finished my presentations, I’m fairly certain the attendees would swear that I knew exactly what I was talking about; they’d also swear, in many cases, that they had no clue what I’d talked about.

So lesson learned.  Teaching educators isn’t that much different from teaching writers (despite the fact that I consider myself a professional writer but not necessarily a professional educator).  I need not worry that the material I deliver will be either obvious or already assumed.  My brain just doesn’t move in those well-traveled channels.  If I’m interested in something enough to teach it, I’d better keep it largely to the basics, because it’s going to be new to a whole lot of people (and weird to perhaps even more). 

But all’s well that ends well (the only one of Shakespeare’s plays I just can’t sit through), and I’ve even been invited back next year, as well as been added to the possible presenter list for additional events.  My mysticism must have impressed enough to earn me a second go around, during which I’ll be certain to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid—any other interpretations will only be considered with the submission of a personal picture).