First day of class

So yesterday was the first time that I got to teach my class. All through my grad studies and beyond I’ve been told by people that I’d make a great teacher, and to a point I’ve started to believe them. Then I tried to really teach for the first time...let’s just say that the bar has been set sufficiently low that so long as I show up wearing pants in the next class they will be happy.

I should clarify that last statement, I don’t want you getting the impression that I was only half clothed while teaching, but that was the only part missing from the nightmare scenario.

One thing you need to know is that like 75% of the classrooms on this campus, my classroom is a “smart” room - though as I’m learning this does not imply that I’m smart in any way. I’d had been given a brief overview of the system and felt pretty confident that I could get it working. Ha! It turns out that the combination of a “smart” room, a new computer and fancy new software conspired to result in my fumbling around behind the podium for about 20 minutes trying to get ANYTHING to appear on the project; all while trying to present some of the material in a coherent fashion. I finally had to flee the classroom to get a tech support guy (I tried calling but all lines were busy, which makes me feel a bit better) to get things up and going.

So with his help things got going, sort of. You see, I started using the Mac software Keynote. It’s really sweet and has a lot of nice features to make presentations that much easier...if they work. I had been relying on being able to see my presentation notes while giving the class, unfortunately due to an error in the settings I couldn’t see anything. Needless to say, flying blind without having memorized everything doesn’t work terribly well.

But like I said earlier, odds are that I can only get better from here. And that’s the true key to success, getting those judging you to have low expectations from the start.