{"id":10023,"date":"2015-04-25T07:01:42","date_gmt":"2015-04-25T11:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=10023"},"modified":"2015-04-25T07:01:42","modified_gmt":"2015-04-25T11:01:42","slug":"way-less-scary-than-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/04\/25\/way-less-scary-than-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Way Less Scary Than Death"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week has been a particularly good one for highlighting how weird my career is. On Thursday, I gave a lecture for the Union College Academy of Lifelong Learning<\/a>, talking for nearly two hours about Einstein (in Memorial Chapel, shown in the “featured image” above). On Friday, I drove clean across New York State (which is really big<\/em>, for the record) so I could give my talking-dog quantum physics talk as the after-dinner lecture at the New York State Section<\/a> meeting of the American Physical Society. <\/p>\n

If you told me in 1985 that I would go into a line of work that involved a lot of public speaking, Iprobably would’ve said you were crazy. I’ve never exactly been quiet<\/em>, but I wasn’t incredibly outgoing as a kid. I was always happy to answer questions in class, but way less enthusiastic about standing up in front of a crowd of people and making a speech. <\/p>\n

For that matter, if you’d told me in 1995 that I would be doing a lot of public speaking, I’m not sure what I would’ve said. My first talk at a big physics conference was that year, at QELS in Baltimore, and I was a nervous wreck. After the talk, one of the post-docs at NIST noted approvingly that I’d moved around a bunch while speaking, not just standing rooted in place. I explained that I’d been doing that because when I tried to stand still, I felt like my kneees were going to buckle. At the time, I might’ve agreed with those surveys where people say they fear public speaking more than death<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So, you know, it’s kind of weird to realize that, twenty years later, I’m in a line of work where I will happily drive 300 miles for the express purpose of standing up in front of a crowd and giving a talk. But I’ve found that this is something I really enjoy. I like the process of laying out a talk that tells a good story, I enjoy making the slides, and most of all I’ve grown to really enjoy the feeling of standing up in front of a crowd and talking– not just using the text I prepared, but ad-libbing stuff along the way. And, you know, sometimes a joke bombs, and I’ve gotten to where I can shake that off without getting too rattled, but when a line I thought of three seconds before I said it connects, it’s a huge kick.<\/p>\n

(This factors into my day job, too, because public speaking is a big part of teaching. My enjoyment of that is probably one of the factors that keeps me from going farther than I do with “active learning” stuff– I understand the reasons PER folks try to get rid of lectures, but can’t quite do it…)<\/p>\n

But every now and then, I do get reminded that to a lot of people, the amount of public speaking I do is just about as weird as the math and physics… It’s become one of my favorite parts of my job, though, and I’m always happy to do more of it.<\/p>\n

(I may put up a more detailed post about the UCALL talk and what I said about Einstein, but today, I’m driving back<\/em> across New York State to get home…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week has been a particularly good one for highlighting how weird my career is. On Thursday, I gave a lecture for the Union College Academy of Lifelong Learning, talking for nearly two hours about Einstein (in Memorial Chapel, shown in the “featured image” above). On Friday, I drove clean across New York State (which… Continue reading Way Less Scary Than Death<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10024,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,2,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academia","category-personal","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}