I am thankful for: experience

Today I had a presentation at uni. The presentation was a kind of half-way report of an essay which is due later this semester, and it is a group project (it's for the teacher's degree I'm working on at the moment). The first problem we had was that we were missing two members of our group (of 4, whereas most other groups have 5 students) and the PowerPoint presentation which was supposed to support our presentation hadn't been done or delivered to us by one of the missing members. 

So here we were, with half the information, no PPT and not much of a plan as nothing had been communicated to us. After a few minutes of deliberating, scrambling, and focusing, we came up with some kind of structure, and divided up the content. We took advantage of being first after the break to write notes on the board (old-school PPT) so students could follow our presentation and to gather our thoughts. Then we explained the situation to our peers, and preceeded with our presentation.

It was a success. The feedback we got regarding both the form and the content was very (surprisingly so) positive, and we went back to our seats wondering how on earth we had pulled that off, even high-fiving as we sat down. 

So for this bizarre but happy ending I have two things to be thankful for: first a very brave and very talented member of my group who came, was prepared and saved the day, and secondly, for my part, the experience of numerous presentations given with varying degrees of preparation throughout my student career and as a teacher. It's true what they say, you can study and study and study, but nothing replaces experience.