The Perils Of Lecturing

There are many things that can go wrong while lecturing. First of all, you can discover that your prepared notes for the display are riddled with errors. Secondly, you can get panicked when you see the room full of apathetic faces staring blankly back at the screen. Thirdly, you can have talkers, which is the worst thing of all, for talkers force you to make a decision. If you let them go then you obviously don't care enough about the whole thing, but if you shush them then you need to succeed in shushing them or face total disaster thereafter. But this is all beside the point.

It is a Tuesday and Tuesdays mean travelling. Part of the problem of a temporary job is the lack of motivation to move properly and so instead for a couple of months I have forced myself to commute for four nights a week. For the most part it is fine except for this week where I am forced to move halfway through the sting, from my plush self-catered hotel to a bed and breakfast over Halloween. I blame Halloween for it all of course. The travelling isn't too bad, as good as a two hour service bus ride can be, but it does leave little time to prepare for the Tuesday lecture.

Ah, Halloween, the one night of the year you don't want to be in a Halloween town. The very though is terrifying in the extreme. Despite eight years of university education I have never actually been out on a Halloween night. The active parts of social evenings start so incredibly late! As someone who tries his hardest to fall asleep at the natural time of nine o'clock (morning or evening, it doesn't matter), it's dispiriting to have to wait until eleven o'clock or midnight for people so I almost never did, apart from when held at the threat of blackmail.

Blackmail... Slipping back into a Sherlock Holmes frame of mind for a moment, that last passage reminded me of the second greatest Sherlock Holmes villain of the stories: Charles Augustus Milverton, the master blackmailer. In many ways he was a far more defined character than Moriarty ever was, and it will be interesting to see what they do with him as the presumably ongoing antagonist for the next series of 'Sherlock'. Which reminds me in turn that the episode 'A Scandal In Belgravia' deserves a blog article all of its own, representing as it does the very best of the series.

Presumably the last lecture I give here will also be my best, as there is an upward trajectory to my successes so far. The real challenge is in addressing the differential in the group, comprising as it does people with very little of mathematics and people who need their mathematics rubber stamped to progress and who know most of it already. It's very hard to make everyone happy in those circumstances, especially when you have too many errors in your presentation, and a magic whiteboard to maneuver around. Or I could just be making excuses. You decide.

Oh, magic whiteboard, you are wonderful but also so so useless.

O.