Friday, 11 December 2015

Blog 9 Lecturing is Easy


Lecturing is Easy

Final preparation is your own worst enemy when it comes to deliverance day. Every demon enters your head and all the worst outcomes are there. Or maybe that’s just my sheer hatred of presenting shining through. Our final preparation was simply making a few notes and timing our presentation again, we felt ready for once in our lives.

It turned out our presentation was second from last and that was painful. The anxious wait as all the other groups went ahead was a killer. As is natural you think every presentation is better than yours, but the more worrying thing was the calibre of questions being asked. You really needed to know what you were talking about up there. With this in mind, we decided to put our extra time to good use and planted a few questions just so it was not a bombardment of question we couldn’t answer. Having a few answers prepared is a great way to settle the mind.

Time really flies by when you are standing up there presenting and you probably give the same amount of information as you would in an hour and a half exam. Understanding the information well enough to present is completely different to an exam situation though, because there is literally no room for waffling up there and to be able to have a discussion at question time means purely learning off information is not an option.

Our presentation well reasonably well, 68% well to be exact. We had our planted questions answered and were able to answer a few more too which I felt was great. But we did manage to mess up our game a bit, it was our first run at it though so not a complete failure. We were disappointed with our overall mark, we felt we had done a bit better than 68% but then again we’re not experts in presenting.

I actually enjoyed this section of the module and felt that it is a much more appropriate way of learning material, other than memorising for an exam. It really puts a broader scope on what you are learning, other that purely memorising facts. It also teaches an element of preparation, as a task like is 90% preparation and 10% delivering. You cannot just rock up and waffle through a presentation.

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