Completed the OSHA 500 Trainer Course, Celebrated with an Earthquake.

I was back in the classroom again this week, not as an instructor, but as a student.  I was taking the OSHA 500 Trainer Course for Construction Industry.  This time with UC San Diego.  The instructor from Hawaii shared a lot of information on both the technical side of safety and teaching.  I learned a lot in this course.  Even the students from various companies on island were very knowledgeable in their respective industry and shared a lot of experiences that they encountered in the field. 

I was assigned to teach Motor Vehicles and Equipment, Subpart O, 29 CFR 1926.600.  This is a subpart of OSHA's Construction Standard.  I know this topic well.  It's long, normally 2 plus hours long.  I was given 45 minutes to 1 hour to teach it.  My presentation time was 1st presenter after lunch on Day 2 of the course, which didn't give me a lot of time to prep: personalize the slide, research if the information on the slides were correct, and check for updates.  I did my best using my slide presentation from my OSHA 30 Hour Construction Course.  I added some information that was not in there.  Updated new information, deleted old ones, added new local pictures (which was a hit with the instructor and students), and changed the background and lettering.  With the time I had to prep, I did pretty good. 

Going into my presentation after lunch the next day, I was not planning nor did I want to score high.  The scoring was anything above 50 was passing with a high score of 75.  My goal that day was to pass.  I did not want to go over my allotted time.  So I did not add videos and demos.  I took out the Pile Driving and Marine Operations sub topics from my topic.   I did add my local safety violation pictures that everyone enjoyed.  One of my co-instructors at OSH Solutions commented that I did really good.  I was just clicking the power point slides, not looking at them much, and just talking about each one.  After my presentation, a lot of my peer evals were in the high side...atta boys, good job, knows what I'm doing, etc.  Kudos from a safety manager with a large company on island, in our class this week.  But the evaluation I was looking forward to seeing was the instructor's evaluation.  I scored majority down the middle of the road with 2 high marks.  I was happy with that.  The presenters in Day 3 and 4 have to do better, now that they've seen the presenters from Day 2.  Which is in my opinion harder because you have to add more instruction based on Visual, Auditory, and Kinetic theory, and to top it off keep it all in their allotted time limit.  I learned from the students in my OSHA 501 class last year.  I did well on the written exam only missing two questions.  It's okay. 

Our surprise for passing the course.  We get a 5.2 Earthquake to celebrate our passing and completion of the OSHA 500.  It was a long one about 10 to 12 seconds.  Thought it was a big rig passing by the building on the backside.  The side to side rumbling told me  otherwise.  Just when I thought it was getting stronger, the shaking started to dissipate.  That was a fun ride...need more of them to wake up the island.