Hurdle cleared!

[eirias]

I gave my first undergraduate lecture today, and was surprisingly non-nerve-wracked throughout, despite the fact that I didn't rehearse it at all. Maybe it's because I've spent the semester trying to stay afloat in the arcana of auditory perception, so the basic stuff was pretty easy to teach? Maybe it's because I spent eleven freakin' hours writing the lecture yesterday? Anyway, it's done, Prof. Cai said he thought it went great, I get to do another on Thursday, yay! Well, yay except for the part where I have to spend some ungodly amount of tomorrow writing the lecture. But we'll ignore that for now.

Man, entire undergraduate courses must be a bitch to write! Either that or there are some serious shortcuts I need to figure out.

Comments

[eldan.livejournal.com]

Excellent!

If my advisor is anything to go by, teaching an entirely new course pretty much occupies a whole semester, with all the preparation and revision of materials, but on the other hand it's something one has to do very rarely. Repeating a course always takes some time outside the lectures themselves, but far less.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Yay, fabulous!

By the way, writing lectures does get dramatically shorter with practice ;).

[tiurin.livejournal.com]

Plus, since eirias is superbly competent, she can even wing it if she has to.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Whoa, superbly competent? That's quite a compliment :). (And probably undeserved - I actually kind of suck at winging it. Ohhhh man I have this awful memory of the first lab meeting I was supposed to lead in grad school, where I couldn't explain simple concepts to people, they were totally lost and bored, and I had to keep asking Jenny to find words for me every five minutes. Not good.)

[nein09.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm really glad that I have someone teaching another section of the course who knows what they're doing and can kind of hold my hand through the whole thing.

[harleybitch.livejournal.com]

man i gave one today and my throat went dry and i suddenly didnt make sense anymore, but debbie says that you get to a point when you have confidence in your lecture and they take way less time to write-- i am not there yet.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

See, I brought a thing of water so my throat wouldn't go dry, and I forgot to drink from it and the only thing that actually happened as a result of my having water there was that I almost spilled it all over my laptop.

I don't know what the moral of this story is, other than dry throats suck.

[tiurin.livejournal.com]

For some reason, that reminds me of this story. http://ifaq.wap.org/society/newpriest.html

[thekat03.livejournal.com]

i would imagine the amount of time that goes into writing lectures is why profs so often just use old lectures, and panic when their laptop releases blue smoke, thus destroying all records of their lectures that they have to give in the next two days (yes, this happened to one of my professors... fortunately, he knew his stuff and there were old copies of his ppts from last year that he could work from)

[rms10.livejournal.com]

The shortcut is not changing anything when you teach it the second time, but other than that . . . yeah.

And if today's lecture took 11 hours to write, I'll bet the next one only takes about half that.

[cognative.livejournal.com]

Either that or there are some serious shortcuts I need to figure out.

It's called "Auto-content" I think it's a new microsoft word function. Just type in "Perception Lecture" and it should fill in the rest.

Congrats though. The only lecture I've given so far was to middle school kids.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

It's called "Auto-content" I think it's a new microsoft word function. Just type in "Perception Lecture" and it should fill in the rest.

*laughs out loud*

[drspiff.livejournal.com]

Woo hoo! Congrats!
I think that it takes longer to put together lectures the first time. Especially if you're putting together powerpoint animations and spending hours surfing images.google.com. The more you actually care, the more time it takes. I spent almost 60 hours putting together one lecture on special relativity with the custom animations I built from scratch (I just had to work that in.) I think though that students can tell how much work you put into a lecture because often they respond better to something you might have put more thought and time into. Only a fool pays tuition to have the book read to them. I would describe teaching as performance art and so it deserves the same attention you give to a research paper. Hopefully you'll find it rewarding in a way where even though it takes energy you get tenfold more enthusiasm in return.
I'd also say that you should remember what made you like the classes you liked when you were an undergrad and do your best to emulate them. It doesn't even have to be a class you liked in your field. In a large lecture I actually pattern my style after a psychology professor I had as an undergrad. And most important make it fun for you because enthusiasm is contagious.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Especially if you're putting together powerpoint animations and spending hours surfing images.google.com.

*cackle*
Guess I'm not the only one who uses that strategy ;). (Though come to think of it, the strategy is probably at least as old as images.altavista.com or whatever that older search engine was.)

I would describe teaching as performance art...

Wow, so now I'm a performance artist too? Awesome. Look out, Laurie Anderson (http://www.laurieanderson.com/)[1]!

[1] who was apparently the first and last artist-in-residence at NASA. (http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/story.php?sid=78&sec=)

[rms10.livejournal.com]

Teaching is absolutely performance art. You should see the dance I do to demonstrate continuous emission from a blackbody.

[dmw7.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! I am wildly impressed.