This morning, I arrived at the office around 8am to get ready for the talk at Quinnipiac. I checked my email, faxed some paperwork, and made copies of my handouts. I wandered down to Randy's office around 9:15. Randy was sitting casually checking his email.
"I didn't get around to merging our slides," he said. My eyes kind of widened, but I didn't say anything else. He had joked the day before about finishing the slides in the car on the way to Quinnipiac.
"Are you planning to wear a tie?" I asked.
"Nah," He said. "I'm planning to wear a nicer shirt, though. How about the Iowa Caucus?" We spoke about the caucuses for a few minutes.
"So when do you want to go?" I asked. "I think we ought to leave by 9:30 or so."
"Oh, yeah!" he said. "I'm thinking 9:30 or even 9am." I looked at the clock that now said 9:35.
"Well, when are we leaving?"
"What do you mean?" he said. "It's not 'til tomorrow, right?"
"No," I said. "It's today!"
It took some convincing, but after we opened the flyer in the email inbox and checked the date, he admitted that the presentation was today and we sprang into action.
We arrived in good order and stopped off at a coffee shop to quick merge the slides together -- we'd already decided how to divide the talk and I had provided him with all my slides yesterday, so it wasn't a big deal. We drove to the University and gave the talk.
Randy described the course and the department, providing a brief overview of where we were going. I discussed the history of change in the department, the learning goals process, the introduction of a classroom communication system, and the subsequent course redesign that produced our existing web resources. Finally, Randy discussed the assessment data and talked about question design. He had the audience work through a true-false problem that used a simple model of cell differentiation: the audience was split 9 for true, 16 for false (and a bunch of undecided). They were hooked.
In the end, the talk was well received and garnered significant interest from the faculty. We stayed for another hour and a half, discussing our teaching approach. Afterwards, Don took us for "lunch" to Aunt Chiladas, a nice Mexican/American restaurant down the street. I probably ate way too many carbs for the day, but it was fun to have an enchilada and chimichanga -- I've missed eating Mexican food. I even ate some chips and salsa! I did mostly avoid the rice and beans, though.