Teaching & Brown Pants!

Well apologies for my lack of blog this week, but it's all got a bit manic in Uni. It all started on Tuesday when I undertook my first teaching class. I decided to follow the old Scouts motto of "Be Prepared" but unfortunately a combination of nerves and the sight of 25 first year students staring at made me turned the event into more of a "Be Scared" occassion!

This may sound really silly, but I went to the lecture theatre early in order to set up for the lesson (tape recorders etc), but when I got there all of the students were already sat in there waiting for me - it threw me completely! My mind went blank and all of my introductory speech went out of the window. I decided the best thing to do was to just get going and start the lecture, even thought I was sure at this point that they could smell my fear. So I started to babble on about how preference works in Conversation Analysis - I had put together loads of hip examples about drinking beer in the SU which I thought would appeal to the younger element in the class (my sad attempt at being in with the youth of today!) but it all went Pete Tong!

I turned around, armed with my dry marker pen to write down the first of the aforementioned examples - "A" I wrote - and then "SHIT" I thought - I was only writing on the overhead projector screen and not the whiteboard! OMG! I quickly grabbed a tissue and rubbed it off - luckily it did, but the damage had been done, the sniggers had started and my dignity compromised :(

I managed to limp through the rest of the lesson, but I felt like a complete idiot.

So on Wednesday, I faced my next class with a bit of trepidation but I am pleased to report that it went a lot better - even though I have a special needs student who talks through the entire lesson and insists on giving me big hugs in the corridor (ah bless!) I felt a lot better and I decided that it was not necessary to wear brown pants to work on Thursday .....

Today I have taught Sociolinguistics to a 2nd year group for 2 hours. I had been told to do a group exercise about qual and quant research methods, as they have to hand in a project plan in a week. I could sense after half an hour that they were bored senseless, so I aborted the mission and we all started talking about their project work instead, which seemed to go down well as 90% of the class didn't have a clue what they wanted to do. Later on in the day, 2 of them came to my office to see me in order to discuss their project work - which I found very strange - it all feels so very grown-up for me to be advising students, I just hope what I told them works out!

Tomorrow I am hosting a data session at Huddersfield Uni for the visiting PhD students at York University which should be fun as they seem like a nice bunch :)

As it is December 1st tomorrow my Christmas decorations have been unleashed. A 15" Christmas tree, two flashing santa's, a sparkly snowman and a £1.99 minature poinsettia plant - very festive! I can't wait for the next 2 weeks to be over as they are going to be very busy, but then I will be coming home - whoopee