this morning, about half way through my lecture, i looked at the 90 students in the lecture hall, and i thought, "would it be the worst thing in the world to send them all home?"
have you ever felt like that while teaching/lecturing? you've come to the middle and you're just out of energy and maybe even out of things to say.
i was talking about thomas jefferson and his internal conflicts as he grappled with the fact that slavery was a contradiction to the ideals of his new republic. i talked about how he justified slavery by espousing the idea that blacks were intellectually inferior, but still had to concede their "humanity."
fun stuff, huh? how could i not have wanted to talk about it for a full hour?
lecture is *hard.* mostly i feel like today was a flop, but there were moments when i felt like i might have said something insightful. i take comfort in the fact that i still have 27 more lectures to go this quarter! 27 opportunities to redeem myself. :P
@>-->>---
2 comments:
i feel like that during discussion section sometimes! do you use slides? it seems like more work prepping, but it could help boost your energy...maybe.
My suggestion? You could have explained to your students that no matter how 'racist' the founding fathers were in their views towards blacks, they were miles ahead of the rest of the world and well ahead of their time. Thomas Sowell explains this well in his recent book Black Rednecks And White Liberals, a must read for any ethnic studies major, IMHO (you could get a very small taste of the book here).
This would have had a double benefit - it would have given you more material to fill your lecture with and taught the students something new, instead of the twisted and one sided history they are already so accustomed to hearing.
But then again, there is nothing students like better than being let out of class early...
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