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

[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.