As you can surely guess from my long silence, the last few months have been really, really busy for me. I’m plowing through my dissertation, plus teaching, working, and applying for jobs. I wish I were the kind of person who could operate on no sleep.

One of the things keeping me busy was a guest lecture I gave for the class I’m TA’ing, Dolores Hayden‘s American Cultural Landscapes. Professor Hayden asked me to develop a lecture from a paper on chain stores that I wrote for her class a few years ago. I was happy to do it, since I think the material is really interesting, and I thought students would be interested, too. I always like putting together lectures, since the visual and sequential format helps me break through any writer’s block I might be inclined to have. Plus putting slides together allows me to indulge my technophilia.

I asked someone from the Graduate Teaching Center to observe and videotape my lecture, so I could get a sense of what I was doing right and what I needed to work on. I was really happy that reactions to my lecture seemed to be pretty positive. Watching the video, though, I can see some things I need to pay attention to. This was my first attempt at lecturing from notes, rather than reading a prepared paper, and in general, I think it makes for a more interesting talk for the audience. I’d like, though, to gain greater fluidity in my extemporaneous speaking, and to eliminate my habit of saying “Um” a lot. I also notice that the upswing in my voice when I end sentences makes me sound more tentative than I really am.

You can watch the video after the jump, although we made the mistake of dimming the lights a little too much — it’s very hard to see me. If I have time, I’d like to do a SlideShare version of the talk so it’s easier to see.

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"Note to Self" by erin m

For me, teaching has become a real pleasure. I feel inspired by my students and I love the feeling of camaraderie that develops in a well-managed classroom. It wasn’t always that way, though. When I first started teaching, I couldn’t believe how much harder it was than I’d imagined. It was all I could think about, and I’d practically have a panic attack before class.

I think professors and administrators sometimes don’t realize how hard it is to start teaching, and how badly we grad students want to do a good job. Unlike K-12 teachers, we get almost no formal training, and what training we do have tends toward the theoretical or the super-specific. The assumption seems to be that we’ve been going to class for eighteen years; it shouldn’t be so hard to make the transition to teacher.

Oh, but it is. It really is. Some people fall into it without batting an eyelash, but we don’t trust these weirdos. For the rest of us, here are some things I wish I’d known when I started.

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"Read OR Listen?" by Suchitra Prints

I spent a year and a half commuting between New Haven and Providence a couple times a week, and over the course of that time I developed a serious addiction to podcasts and audiobooks. For some reason, listening to recordings hits home for me in a really pronounced way. I noticed this when I absorbed a book — John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener — in three different ways: in print, on tape, and in its movie adaptation. All were good, but for me, the most intense, engrossing experience by far was the audio version.

I thought of this because I had an interesting experience in the writing class I’m teaching.

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