Teaching as a Fetish

Overhead projectors an transparencies. Slideshows. Dry-Erase boards. A podium. A stack of notes and reference books.

These are the accouterments of my fetish. Things have to be just so; there is no winging it.  I will go off the syllabus and lesson plan, but I need those in place as a starting point. I have co-taught with other presenters who write their lesson plan on the bar napkin 30 minutes before the class start time and that does not work for me. It feel so incomplete. The entirety of the ritual is important. Reading; researching; correlating notes; writing out the plan; doing the run through and getting feedback; rewrites; an finally, class set up.

You would think with all the emphasis I place on prep time that I would freak out and lose my cookies if a workshop went off track. The opposite is true, though. Because I do all this prep, I can go on and on in an off direction, and the plan helps me figure out if I have covered all the point in the wandering. I once brought an early draft of my lecture notes instead of the final. Using the outline that I give as a hand out turned out to be all I needed to trigger my memory.Thank goodness I know my shit, eh?