Post Presentation

It's been a heavy week - and it's only Wednesday.
Today we had to give our 15-minute presentations on a subject specialist resource we had designed. It sounded like a reasonably simple assignment, but typically I made my Adult Literacy resource relate to my previous area of expertise, psychology and well-being. James W Pennebaker has long been a hero of mine for proving, in controlled clinical research, that writing about trauma - in a freestyle, but structured way - promote psychological and physical well-being.
The result was I didn't finish writing the presentation and preparing the Powerpoint until late the night before so there was no time to rehearse and I ended up reading from notes - which I'm sure I'll get marked down on. But in a choice between free delivery but losing my place and thread and leaving out important info, and sticking to a script which progressed with clarity and got in all the necessary points, I chose the latter.
This course is making me feel strangely de-skilled in many ways. I've delivered management training, talks, seminars, workshops and creative writing classes for many years; ok, I may not have done so in a technically perfect way, but feedback has always been good and I've always thought that I can get information over to people and relate well to an audience/class. Now I feel like I don't know how to do it right any more at all; that my natural style has been compromised and I may be too old a dog to learn new tricks successfully. When I have presented research reports in the past to an academic audience, there has been no problem with working from notes - in fact it's expected.
I feel the same about writing, after the marking of Module 1 essays - though these are now being re-checked and it has been admitted that they were marked at Level 5 standards instead of Level 4, which this course is.
And yet I'm not impressed with the administration of the course nor the modelling of how to run a satisfactory course for students (not "learners", we've now been told - "students" is college policy). The teaching of our two main tutors has been excellent, but the surrounding admin and support pretty useless.