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tell me about your first lecture

5 replies

lookingouttosea · 10/09/2019 13:26

I had mine yesterday. I'm close to submitting my PhD and I have some relevant industry experience so I was given a PG module to teach. Found it quite tough! I was exhausted afterwards. I have young children so this is my first 'work' outside of home that's not my PhD in 4 years and my first ever job that's involved speaking to people in large numbers. Students very diverse, experienced and knowledgeable so I felt they were judging my relative lack of experience compared to other lecturers (I'm not "Dr" yet). After the class I noticed several had looked up my LinkedIn profile.
How was your first lecture? Is it normal to feel a bit overwhelmed?

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Booboostwo · 10/09/2019 13:45

Yes, I think it's quite tough at the beginning!

I had to read out my first lecture, there was no way I could have spoken it and my PhD supervisor was sitting at the back of the room keeping n eye on things! It was a harrowing experience.

My first seminar was even worse...I even bored myself!

However, it does get better. After my first seminar I went straight to the two people I knew who are great teachers and asked them for help. I copied their style and ideas until I could develop my own.

milliefiori · 10/09/2019 13:52

I also pretty much read my first lecture. I was so nervous my voice wobbled and no one laughed at the dry asides. Same (tweaked, updated and now off-the-cuff) lecture three years later gets really positive responses from colleagues and students.

And my first seminar was embarrassing. Students all stared at me puzzled and I asked why. They said I'd already told them what I'd just told them, very clearly indeed so why was I repeating it? I realised I was teaching the way I instructed my reception age DC, by speaking slowly and saying everything three times!

wonkywheels · 12/09/2019 12:03

Totally normal to find it overwhelming. The first lectures I did were to first years and the feedback was that they were really boring. I couldn't disagree. I think it takes a while to find the approach that works best for you and in the meantime (even after that) teaching can be really exhausting. PGs can be both easier (more engaged) and more difficult (more challenging). It will definitely get better. Good luck!

SarahAndQuack · 16/09/2019 20:55

Very normal! And it sounds as if it went fine. IMO it is a good thing they looked you up - it's probably a sign of interest.

My first lecture was just after I finished my PhD, and intimidatingly it was in the exact lecture room where I had heard my first undergraduate lecture a decade before. I had prepared a careful powerpoint with lots of images and had organised handouts for the number of students I was told to expect.

On the day, the powerpoint resolutely refused to work, and I discovered there was no tech support whatsoever (though a very nice bloke did try to help me sort it before telling me he'd asked around and all the tech in the building was known to be unusable and needed updating - a fact no one had mentioned before).

So, five minutes late starting, I had to wing the whole thing without my images, and to make it worse there were roughly three times as many students as there should have been (no compliment to me - the person who told me the number simply fucked up), so they were sharing handouts one between three.

Despite that, I survived! Grin I even got perfectly decent evaluations for the course overall, which shows me that students are quite capable of being fair and compassionate, and they realised the tech issues were not my fault.

Good luck with the next one!

lookingouttosea · 19/09/2019 12:37

Thank you for the replies. Reassuring... Its so strange that you can spend years doing a PhD, have no experience working with students and then suddenly have to face them. What's to say you're not completely shy or introverted? I'm lucky in the sense that I'm quite outgoing anyway but I still find it very tough standing up there for 2 hours in front of a room full of people..

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