Classes started yesterday for the winter term. This is the first time I’ve had to teach in six months, thanks to juggling my schedule so as to let me stay home for much of the Fall term. I’m always surprised by how much I forget, and how much I remember about the process.
The remembered stuff is pretty obvious– bits of trivia that aren’t in my lecture notes, or old ad-libs that work well to hep make some point or another. The forgotten stuff is stuff that seems like it ought to be obvious, like just how much talking is involved in the process. I came out of yesterday’s class and drank the better part of a liter of water immediately, and my mouth was still dry.
The class I’m teaching– sophomore-level “Modern Physics” (i.e., Relativity and QM)– necessarily involves a lot of lecturing. This isn’t the sort of material that students have good intuition for, so it’s really hard to do much with class discussion. Especially at the start, when there’s a fair bit of background that they need to learn before anything else.
Of course, I’m forever second-guessing that, especially after reading stories about the effectiveness of “peer instruction”. And I will make the usual effort to get more discussion into the class, probably starting with the paradoxes that crop up in relativity, which should be Friday’s class. There’s enough material to cover, though, and so much of it is factual in nature, that I always end up defaulting to a mostly-lecture format.
Which means that I always forget just how much of the class time is spent talking. There are plenty of things that are worse to forget, of course, but that doesn’t cut down on the amount of water I end up drinking.