When I was lecturing in a private college before my marriage, my computer students went on vacation for a month. I was secretly looking forward to doing some research to augment my meager teaching notes. However, it was not meant to be. I was drafted into running a series of computer literacy classes for more than five hundred Accountancy students.
I went to planning meetings with the Dean of Accountancy. I talked to the computer lab technicians about facilities and programs the students could use to do my homework. I went to access the latest programming books to see how things have changed since my Senior year in college. Then I hurriedly planned my lessons, prepare student notes to be printed and visited the lecture theater to test the sound system as well as the over head projection. That was years before power point was available. One week was gone.
The following three weeks were spent teaching, holding lab tutorials and marking the assignments as well as running off the final test. At that point of time I was not only feeling bone weary but was a little upset that I had no opportunity to improve my own subject for the second year of teaching. By now, I saw that experience in a different light. That was the only big challenge I had throughout my teaching career of planning a short course from scratch and then implementing it myself for such a big group of students. Should I need to speak to a sizable audience in the future, I know I have done it before and can prepare to do it again. Perhaps someday that experience would come in handy.
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