A month and a half ago Kimberly from University of Washington found me on Twitter. She reached out to me asking if I would be a guest speaker to talk about about Kuwait’s education, the everyday life in Kuwait and about my personal life. I gasped when I read her email and automatically replied back saying that I would love to. I was very nervous but knew that this would be a great opportunity.
She scheduled our chat for August 7th at 12:30am (my time) 2:30pm their time. As the day kept getting closer I was getting more and more nervous. I messaged my dear colleague and he gave me a few pointers and calmed me down as he usually does. I kept asking him, “What if I fail them? What if they don’t benefit from my talk? What if… What if… What if…”
The day finally came. I prepared and researched a few things which helped me during my talk. I opened up Zoom and I was ready and by 12:40 we connected. I didn’t let my husband stay up and listen to me as I was so nervous!
I saw myself on the huge screen and it frightened me as this was my first time ever speaking in front of an audience like that. Kimberly turned the computer so that I could see the whole class and we waved Hello. Then it was time to get down to business.
She asked me to begin with information about myself. I explained my career journey and what I did to get to be an assistant principal. She then asked me to explain my student teaching experience in a government school and how was life in a government school and then opened the class with questions. It was supposed to take 45 minutes however, it lasted about an hour. I couldn’t believe how fast the time flew by! When I was about 10 minutes into it, I calmed down a bit. I answered many questions and they were all were shocked to learn about our education system. Our line disconnected and wouldn’t reconnect again.
A few minutes later I received a beautiful email from Kimberly thanking me and saying that the session was great. Phew! I can breathe! The next thing you know students had started tweeting. I began wondering what the students thought of our talk?! Was I ok? Did they benefit from my talk? Did I mess up?! Next thing you know, Twitter was out of control and I had received tweets from students thanking me and telling me about how much they had enjoyed our chat and how I was able to help them learn about Kuwait and our education. You can read their tweets using #IntEdUW.
I was on cloud 9. I truly enjoyed the talk and I wasn’t able to sleep even though I had a flight to catch at 7am!
Thank you once again for inviting me to be the guest speaker for your class.
