Yesterday I woke up (too late) to the knowledge that I had managed to schedule myself to teach one class from noon to 4 and another from 3 to 5 on the same day. My alarm went off at the right time and I got out of bed at the right time, but it was mid-morning before I really realized that I had managed to double-schedule myself in front of the classroom—and almost noon before I realized that I might actually also have another meeting at 2. (That one, thank goodness, had been canceled.)
The 3 to 5 class is my regular weekly gig; the noon to 4 job was one I'd been volunteered for by my mentor, Billy Jack. Billy Jack sort of adopted me early in my career with this department (whodathunk I'd still be here almost 18 years later?) and had saved my butt more than once when things looked sketchy for me. So when he first asked me maybe a decade ago to fill in for two days during the summer courses he teaches every other year, I was happy to comply; I sort of didn't realize that I was signing up for a repeat gig every couple of years, but that's really worked out okay.
What I do in his reservoir management class is a condensed form of the tech writing course I teach on my own job description, and teaching his class gives me a chance to update a couple of slides sets that I wind up using in my own classes most semesters. So it's not a bad deal in the long run.
Yesterday I got to the noon class a few minutes early, and a couple of students asked me if I was likely to run as far past class time as I had the previous week. Didn't plan to; I had spent the morning tweaking the slides in an effort to cut the show to about an hour and a half. Too bad, they said; the World Cup Soccer match between Germany and Spain would be coming on at 1:30, and if I ran past then, they could sit in the back of the computer-equipped classroom and watch the match instead of having to go to work. I apologized for not expecting to be able to help them.
What I hadn't factored in was that Billy Jack was on campus yesterday, and he wanted to start class with a few housekeeping items. That entailed tweaking a spreadsheet to update his student presentation schedule and then briefing the students on their responsibilities relevant to it. That took up a half-hour or so of my scheduled time, but I figured I could still finish plenty before 3, and the students might get a chance to catch part of the Word Cup.
I hadn't counted on Billy Jack to sit in on the lecture, either. I'm pretty confident about what I do, and I have worked pretty closely with him in developing my philosophy and my approach—but that didn't make me eager to deliver the lecture with him in the room. Besides, he's older than I am, and I wasn't at all sure he'd be thrilled to sit in class for that long. But there he was.
I fired up the slide show and dove into the presentation, which went smoothly for maybe 10 minutes—when the bald guy in the back of the room stopped me to ask questions. I knew the answers were going to come up in a later part of the show—the first part was only an overview—but since I didn't know if he'd stick out the whole class and I didn't want to be rude, I answered his questions as completely but succinctly as I could.
He didn't leave—not for the whole class. And he continued to interrupt with questions all through the lecture. I never mind answering questions from the students because interruptions during the lecture give them more timely answers than questions at the end, and I can tell them what I think, after which I normally remind them that they are adults, and if they don't agree with me, that's okay, too.
But when the kid asking the questions is your friend and mentor and the class you're addressing is his class, not yours, the situation feels a little different. In addition, a good deal of the time he was playing the devil's advocate, challenging me on some things that I knew he agreed with and on other things that I wasn't so sure about. If I'd been in my own classroom with my own students where my word gets to be the law, I'd have just said what I thought without thinking about it much; standing in his classroom with his students whom I was supposed to be helping get ready for his assignments—a little different.
I typically tell stories along the way to try to reinforce the points I'm making, and one of my favorites is about the discussion Billy Jack and I had had when I was still new to the department (and, really, to both engineering and technical writing) where I was able to support my opinion with evidence from his own writing. I've been telling the story in class for years, and it's always gotten a laugh from the students when they catch the punch line. I told it in a class in the spring where Billy Jack was in the room but far enough from me that I couldn't see his expression in dim light; the students laughed, but I didn't know how he felt about it. He didn't mention it after class, so I figured I'd skated—but yesterday I couldn't possibly get off that easily.
I reached the point in the lecture where the story fit, walked away from the podium, and picked up some papers lying on a nearby desk to use as "visual aids." I got through the story as usual, but not one of the students seemed to respond to it, which rattled and disappointed me. But as I dropped the papers and started back to the podium, I caught Billy Jack's expression: he was grinning from ear to ear.
Between the late start and the interruptions, the hour and a half had stretched to well over two hours, so I figured the students in the back of the room were still behaving politely because they must have had the World Cup match on their computers. I finished the lecture a little after 2:30, scanned a draft of one of the students' papers, chatted momentarily with another, and headed upstairs to my 3 o'clock class.
I stopped by my office to refill my tea glass, zipped through the restroom, and landed in the classroom right at 3 o'clock, much to the apparent disappointment of the half-dozen young men in the room. One of them gutted up enough to ask the question they all were thinking: can we go back to our offices to watch the rest of the match?
"Why?" I asked him. "Can you watch it on your computers?"
Nods.
"We've got a perfectly good screen right here," I pointed out. "Put it on, turn down the sound, and you can watch the game and listen to me."
Really? Yeah, really. I watch television while I'm doing other stuff all the time. (I have a set on now. Don't ask me what's on it; not sure I know.)
Before the nearest student to the computer got the match on, I had sat down in one of the comfortable chairs in the conference room I use for class—and suddenly felt nearly three hours on my feet and talking. By the time I got my bearings with the "futbol match," I realized that only 10 or 15 minutes were left in the game. For that, I could delay a 2-hour class a few minutes and run over time if we needed it. In fact, the computer operator had carefully turned the volume down to a whisper; I had him run it back up loud enough to here the hum of the vuvuzelas in the stands.
The game ended and went into a couple of minutes of overtime, and the guys saw a couple of chances for Germany to tie it up with Spain. But when time ran out it was Spain 1, Germany 0, so we all knew the championship was going to be the Netherlands and Spain, and my group of Middle Eastern students was ready to go to work.
The lesson of the day was writing SMART objectives, so I laid out the rules and practiced examples for various students, and most of them took notes furiously. Several are writing literature reviews that won't need objectives, so we worked on how they might approach writing their methods for their next assignments. All in all, I thought it went pretty well, and I wrapped up everything I needed to cover in time to let them out at 5.
On my way out of class, I stopped to tell the post-doc in the office next to our room that I hoped we hadn't disturbed him, and he looked at me in surprise. "You let them watch the match in class?" he asked. "That's cool!"
It hadn't been a big deal to me, and in fact I had appreciated the few minutes to rest. But it was neat to know one of the other young men in the department had seemed to think I'd scored.
Or at least my throat was telling me something close to that; after almost 5 full hours of lecturing, it was at least a little sore!
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