Well, this year was a bit of a doozy on many levels.

Doing such a large event all online with teachers of varied technology experience requires a lot of prep work and a ton of patience. We mustered through and, as a whole, the event went quite well.

It was hard for me to gauge when I would need to take extra time to do things since I had never done them before, so there as a little bit of frustration for Tim not knowing when I would be busy. That is one of the really nice things about the in-person contest. I know I’ll be crazy busy, but at least I can plan to just be “gone” for that entire contest weekend and then it’s done. Tim is mentally prepared to just live that weekend as if I’m out of town.

The snag came after the contest judging was done–we emailed out the results and then I put all of the actual critiques in the mail the next day. When the paper critiques started to arrive in the teachers mailboxes we realized that there had been a glitch in the computer system and it had misaligned the scores with the teacher emails–meaning some teachers had received emailed scores that were different than their actual critique scores.

Oh dear. What a mess.

So, there was a lot of extra work needed to help resolve teacher/parent relations as well as teacher/MMTA relations and a lot of frustrations/embarrassments all around. There was retyped critiques. There was extra phone calls. There was apology letters. There was a lot of emails. A lot.

And there was also chocolate cake delivered to the MMTA office staff. Chocolate always makes things better. 🙂

So, now we move onward and upward. This year has been so great in so many ways, and not so great in so many ways. We learn and adapt and make notes and move on.