About the time that I started going to the Agora meetings, I also started facilitating the CISSP review seminars for (ISC)^2, the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium. Hence the need for the TN-1 visas. (Initially, most of the seminars I did were in the States.)
In those dim and distant carefree days, we were sent out as pairs of instructors. Sometimes it would be a matter of teaching for an hour on, an hour off, or sometimes we would divvy up the domains that we taught, but, in any case, it allowed you to have a bit of a break from what is, after all, a really, seriously intense seminar to be dealing with. You are faced with a group of perhaps thirty candidates for the certification exam. All of them have at least five years work experience, simply in order to get into the seminar. Sometimes you will be faced with a class that has a half a dozen very senior people, all of whom have fifteen to twenty years experience, in particular and specific subfields of security. You have to be able to stand up and deliver forty hours of material, and answer all kinds of questions, and not look like an idiot. Having a second instructor allows for a bit of a break from this very intense occupation, and also allows for a second opinion if you can't immediately think of anything to answer a question that has been asked. It's a good way to learn security, certainly. The class is always asking questions that you, yourself, have never asked, and the research that you have to do in order to answer these questions gets you into a lot more areas and fields of security than anything that you will ever work on in your job. As far as I was concerned, it was the best teaching job ever. You always knew that everyone had the basic prerequisites, which is never something you can count on in any other type of commercial training.
Anyway, as I say, they sent us out in pairs. One of the other instructors that I was paired up with, fairly frequently when I first started instructing, had narcolepsy. I didn't know this when I started teaching with him, and was quite offended when he started out the morning, taught for a couple of hours, and, when I took over, went and sat in the back of the room and immediately fell asleep. He did explain, later.
But it did have a bearing on one of the subsequent seminars that we taught together. In this particular seminar, one of the candidates worked for a company that, as the seminar started, had just had a disaster in the field of information security. So, this guy was sitting in the seminar all day, trying to retain as much as he could of what we were covering, and then racing back, through heavy Atlanta traffic, to his workplace, which was all the way across town, putting in six or eight hours trying to deal with the disaster, and then driving home and catching two or three hours sleep, before he had to rush back to the seminar the next morning. By about Wednesday, his body figured that he had had enough. He was seated at the rear of the classroom, on the right. My co-instructor was seated at the back of the classroom, on the left. And at some point they both fell asleep. And started to snore. In stereo.
The entire seminar group burst out laughing.
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