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Fifteen days ago I presented a couple of talks at the South Carolina Independent School Association’s (SCISA) Fall Teachers’ Conference (paid subs can read my full remarks here and here [or here and here on Substack]; slides are available for anyone to view here and here). It was a bit of whirlwind, as the teachers’ conference kicked off about four days of SCISA-related activities, as I headed back out for a Cognia reaccreditation team visit two days after the conference. With last week’s lengthy post about that team visit, I neglected to writeup a postmortem of the teachers’ conference and the talks I delivered.
I love conferences. At their worst, they’re basically people with do-nothing e-mail jobs getting together to cheat on their spouses and eat free food on their companies’ dimes. At their best, they’re opportunities for learning and growth, as well as making real connections with people in your field. Either way, you walk away with a tote bag full of swag and a lot of pastries.
My school used to attend this particular conference fairly regularly, but slowly turned the day into an in-school “professional development day”—what we used to call a “teacher workday”—and we missed out on all the fun sessions. Perhaps it was the heated debate I got into with a radicalized black gentleman who insisted that the murderous slave rebel Nat Turner, who slew children and even babies in cold blood, was morally justified in his actions that made my administration loathe for us to return, but I think that would be giving myself too much credit (that man also told me that when he looks at a “person like you, I see a serial killer,” to which I replied, “well, I do have a certain Bundy-esque sensuality”; this was pre-Trump, so I’d like to think I was a pioneer of doubling-down, back when it was still dangerous to disagree with a “person of color”). Whatever the reason, my admin deemed the conference unworthy of our time, so instead we did boring trainings that often amounted to us hanging around until an arbitrary dismissal point.
However, the new headmaster is a big fan of the SCISA Fall Teachers’ Conference, and my colleagues were encouraged to attend (sadly, only one did besides our head). With my increase in unstructured time, I though it would be fun to lead a couple of sessions, so I reached out to the head of SCISA, got the details, and signed up to give my talks.
In true portly fashion, I waited until the week of to hammer out my talks, and my method was a bit different than usual. Typically, I’ll write out my remarks first, then assemble a slide deck based on the talk’s main points. This time, I used Google Slides as a way to help me outline my remarks to start, then I started writing the talks themselves. As I worked on the talks, I’d then go back and add to the slides as I worked. It was more of a simultaneous building-out, and it seemed to work, although I think both talks need some substantial trimming and focus.
The first talk (the second I delivered on the day) was about teaching private music lessons to supplement your income, and I drew heavily from an article I wrote on that topic that was published in the Fall 2026 issue of Self-Reliance (it’s just $7.99 for a print copy), a DIY magazine that is the sister publication with Backwoods Home Magazine (I recommend both highly). I wanted to shift the emphasis slightly, however, to address administrators as well as teachers. Teaching in independent education in rural South Carolina does not come with a big fat paycheck—people are often shocked to learn that we earn far less than public school teachers, and we don’t get nearly the same benefits (although not dealing with public school issues is a huge benefit in and of itself)—and budgets are tight, so giving teachers time during and after school to earn extra money is a way to help those teachers supplement their income at no additional cost to the school (other than negligible facilities costs for things like electricity, which is already running for hours after school with athletics). Some administrators get so caught up in their “policies” or preferences that they inadvertently run off good teachers. Fortunately, my admin was always very supportive of my private music lessons.
The second talk (delivered first) was about putting together a garage band-style music class on a shoestring budget by taking a DIY approach. I pulled from my experience doing just that over the course of fifteen years.
It’s one thing to put all this stuff together; it’s another to deliver it to people—and the people have to show up. As such, here’s how it went.
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