Swapping hats

One of the things I love about my job is the variety. So after a long year working pretty solidly on Oxford EAP, I was keen to take on more of a mix of short projects. Inevitably, what I’d envisaged as a sequence of nice little jobs has ended up as a bit of a manic juggling act with everything getting busy at the same time!  I’m not complaining, because it’s good to be busy, but there are times when I start to feel like I’m running out of different compartments to file everything in my brain!

In the past week or so, I’ve worked on materials for low level Spanish teens, technical ESP, EAP and teacher training. I’ve done some editing and some rewriting, I’ve written workbook exercises, blog posts and an outline syllabus for a teacher training course. But it’s not the written stuff that’s the real challenge …

On Saturday I was in Oxford for an EAP event; a BALEAP PIM at Oxford Brookes University, giving a session on feedback on EAP writing. The whole day was really good and a great opportunity to catch up with EAP colleagues. But it was very niche and the audience were hardcore EAP folk – largely full-time EAP tutors at UK universities and serious academics. It’s a bit of a daunting gig, especially as something of an outsider (i.e. not a full-time EAP person attached to a university), but I think the session went down really well and people gave me lots of nice feedback afterwards.

Back at home today and I’ve been trying to switch my brain into a completely different mode to give a webinar (twice over the next couple of days) on a slightly different topic and to a very different audience; this time a much more general ELT crowd and drawn from right across the world. I generally enjoy presenting and I’ll happily talk away on almost any topic, but delivering two different presentations just a few days apart without getting them muddled up or forgetting anything is going to be a bit of a challenge.

Oh well, as my Mum puts it, I’ll just chat and wave my hands about and I’m sure it’ll be fine …