Blog 8 Become a teacher inside a week.

Become a teacher inside a week.

I have to take my hat off to Barry and say that the teaching class was a very sly move in terms of our learning as students. As he very well knows it’s nearly impossible to teach a class, or convey a product/idea without fully understanding what you are delivering. It is then even double as tough to answer questions for 5 minutes unless you completely thought the whole process through. This week was probably the most stressful of the whole lot. We hadn’t had many lectures recently due to some other arrangements and the whole thing seemed to fall on top of us. It amazing when you begin to piece a presentation together on a topic you felt you understood only to see there are holes in your understanding everywhere.

The aim of the teaching class was that you must display the whole product, bioprocess and thinking behind it all in 10 minute presentation. This is much more difficult than first imagined. To make a presentation where people won’t fall asleep is also extremely difficult. After a trial run on our presentation we found that it was very monotonous and didn’t show the product in its true light so it was back to the drawing. We penned the idea to reduce some of the science and improve the interaction and deliverance end.

We ended up using less slides, using much more statistics (which sound really good, from listening to other groups presentations), more pictures and we invented a little game “name the ancillaries” a game where the class must label the ancillaries on our bioreactor. By using more statistics we felt that the data was much more relatable to people who mightn’t have an interest in the Food Science area and the game was purely to keep the class interested and entertained.

With a day to go we felt prepared, until we did our practice run. It is very hard to keep a pace while speaking to a group. Maybe it was nerves but getting our presentation to stick to 10 minutes was extremely difficult. And again by making us stand up in front of everyone Barry forced us to know our stuff or face 10 minutes of hell.