Giving a Lecture

Is perhaps the most terrifying thing about being a university lecturer actually having to lecture? Lecture theatres are strange places anyway. You look up at your audience. You often have to compete with noisy heating or air-conditioning.
We have about sixty-five students supposed to be attending our core lecture. I actually counted over fifty today. That is not too bad considering that there are a lot of bugs going round and this is the week in which a whole load of assignments are due in.
My voice doesn’t carry well these days. The desk mike only seems to work if you stand on top of it. I elected to have a radio mike. I was able to collect it on the way for the audio visual department is in the same building as the lecture theatre where I was working. I really recommend them. Teachers at all levels need to preserve their voice.
Well, I think the lecture went okay. They seemed to hear me without straining, though I myself couldn’t tell whether the mike was working properly.
I posted notes for them on Blackboard, our VLE, which gave them the focus of the lecture. I used a version of this for myself, though I actually wrote timings on it as well. The slightly odd situation here is that I am a fiction specialist and I was lecturing on poetry. A colleague, who is a poet, actually lectured on autobiography. It had to be that way, as he is off on a project soon. The poet who wrote the lecture has put more detailed notes on Blackboard and some quotations. I gave them a handout of the quotations but highlighted some of them on a Power Point display I showed via the projector. So, they had plenty of hooks.
I always worry that I won’t have enough material to fill the time. Yet, somehow, it does last. Maybe because even when you’re using a mike, when you speak to a large audience you slow right down.
And I have to admit, I quite enjoy the experience, though I can be respectably nervous beforehand. The oddest part is just being in a room with so many other people hanging on your every word.

Working with Students

I had a lovely time with the four Level 2 students who turned for their class at 4.00 p.m. yesterday. It is very near to the end of term and they have already given in their assignments so in this class we talk about publishing possibilities. I myself am editing three books this year: anthologies, one about Salford, an Advent Calendar of stories and other short pieces and the Twelve Days of Christmas, slightly longer pieces.
We ate chocolates and discussed the vagaries of the publishing world and methods of critiquing work.
I guess I’ve got a pretty good day job. My favourite occupation is, of course, writing and my second favourite is talking to other writers about writing. I’m sure I learn as much from them as they learn from me.