Fresh after a good night’s sleep and a hearty breakfast, I walked the five minutes between my hotel and the conference centre, feeling sure it would be much easier to negotiate than it was in my addled state yesterday. Turns out, not so much! I’m not entirely convinced by Harrogate conference centre – Liverpool and Glasgow were – or at least seemed – both more user-friendly. Also, there were no talks in portacabin come tents (e.g. Queen A – I don’t think any queen in her right mind would give it her royal seal of approval! :-p ), or in the case of my room, half in the corridor.

Nevertheless, it’s been a super-interesting day, though I had to pace myself in order to keep at least some energy for my talk, which terrorised me increasingly, the closer the start time loomed. I even had to come back to my hotel room for an hour to recharge myself just prior to my talk (thank you Sandy, for that life-saving idea! I bumped into Sandy and upon seeing how frazzled I was, she told me where to go – my hotel room! Thank goodness – it saved me.)

Anyway, my talk is over and I’m happy – it was ok. But I’ve already posted a post about the content of that, so no need to go into details here.

In fact, today’s end-of-day post is mostly going to be devoted to things I love about IATEFL:

• walking from conference centre to hotel first thing in the morning, bright and early, looking forward to a brand new day of learning. (This morning was extra early because I went to one of the pre-plenary sessions as well – tomorrow I shall merely get in in time for the plenary!)

• bumping into someone you worked with briefly the previous summer, hadn’t been in touch with, hadn’t been expecting to see, in the loos prior to the plenary, and then enjoying the plenary with them [a.k.a random, unexpected encounters with people!]

• picking up the annual black cat publishers bag (they make good handbags :-p)

• planning to go to this talk and that talk, but then actually going to something entirely different because you bumped into someone and decided that you quite fancied what they were heading towards.

• bumping into people you know and haven’t seen for ages randomly in the corridors and how delighted you feel when it happens.

• seeing people talk about things they are deeply interested in and enthusiastic about.

• realising (again) how big the world of TEFL is (so many contexts that you don’t necessarily generally think too much about,  in your day-to-day little bit of it) and yet how small (all those people you keep bumping into…)

• meeting loads of people that you know from online but hadn’t yet met “in real life”; putting real faces to PLN names.

• the way that in the third year you attend, you know way more people than in the first year and so you get lots more of bumping into people.

• as a presenter, the lovely feeling of presenting to an audience in which you know a fair few people and they are there supporting you.

• fondling beautiful ELT-related books in the exhibition area and wishing you could buy them all and read them all…

To me, IATEFL is about the learning (attending talks, giving talks) but also about keeping in touch with the big, wide ELT world that exists out there. It’s about being exposed to tons of new ideas and learning random new things related to the profession. (Example of a random fact I’ve picked up this time round: I learnt that there are loads of freelance editors out there; previously I had just assumed that each publishing company had only in-house editors) You get to meet all kinds of people, working in all kinds of contexts, that you wouldn’t otherwise get to meet. There are people that attend year in, year out, and it never gets old for them. And of course every year, new people come too. It’s not something that once you’ve done it once (attending or presenting), that’s it, you can tick it off a list and move on.

It was great to speak today, but I’m looking forward to tomorrow because I can just go to loads of talks and not worry about pacing myself so that I’m not frazzled by last session of the day (when I spoke today!). I’ve got my plan of what to see, and I know jolly well I won’t stick to it, and that’s just fine. I wouldn’t have it any other way. (There was discussion prior to IATEFL regarding whether it would be good to have to register to see talks prior to the conference; I think that would be a terrible idea – I like being able to change my mind at the last minute!) I will also be wearing my Leeds Met alumna hat tomorrow and hanging out with Leeds Met folk, during the morning break, in the Holiday Inn Foyer (across from the centre), to answer questions about the course from student perspective – so if you are interested, do come along and see us! 🙂

One thing that really strikes me as I sit here typing this is: It’s just wonderful to see so many people in one place who really care about what they do and want to share that with others who also really care about what they do, and to be a part of that. The amount of positive energy reverberating around IATEFL is phenomenal. I’m really glad I’ve been able to attend this year. It’s my third and I hope it’s far from being my last! 🙂