Under The Fridge

One of the things I do regularly at work is lecture in undergraduate courses. Generally teaching students how to program in various languages.

This semester I’m in front of by far the largest class I’ve taught - around 250 students - which is turning out to be quite a lot of work. I need to be a lot more prepared than usual and because I’m not yet able to get a feel for how the class is absorbing the content, I have to stick closely to my lecture plan.

It’s also an introductory course, and I haven’t really done much lecturing at that level before.

Last week I realized that I was lecturing while tired, and wasn’t all that interested in the content myself, so was coming across quite boring. Students were yawning, and there just wasn’t much life in the air. A tedious class is just that much harder for the students, and I’d really like to communicate that it can be quite an exciting topic.

So today I made sure I was a little more interested in the content, I made sure I’d slept well and I timed lunch so my energy levels were high going in.

I ended up racing through the content - I go fast when I’m excited - and the hour lecture finished in 40 minutes. I’m not convinced that many students could keep up.

So now I need to figure out a way to stay interested myself while maintaining a slightly slower pace.

Ah, the challenges of teaching.

- Colin

This entry was posted on Monday, July 24th, 2006 at 4:25 am and is filed under Teaching & Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.