i just had my video-recorded training teaching session today, about which i was nervous as hell preparing for it. i chose to present a simple wage search model that they will cover later on in term, which wouldn't be as boring to me or the other economics phds who would form the audience. but it was slightly more difficult because this is not a topic that i deal with every day.

and it was sort of in reverse order, there were 2 of us who came for the session having not been to the theory sessions, which will be next week. so we had to do our own reading up.

basically it was 4 people going at it and then indulging in mutual and self criticism. my initial fear was that i would think i was teaching fine and then cringe when i saw the video. on the contrary, it was a good day for me because i thought watching the video that i was pretty alright, and it felt less like that as i was teaching.

my main weakness was with precision. as i was going through the motivation and exposition i didn't do some simple things like making sure the axes were labelled, or to mention the proper units of measurement. i also had to wing it when i elicited a question for which i expected a certain response which wasn't relevant. but it turned out that simply pointing out that the suggestion was not what you had in mind is a sensible way of dealing with those things.

picked up a few skills. how to partition the board. confirmed my distrust of projector-based methods of teaching quantitative subjects. linking the topic of the day to the previous lesson and to subsequent work. and they were really really sharp, although we were mostly presenting different courses they could pick up little mistakes in the content although we weren't meant to be prepared. then again this is undergraduate economics work.

but it was a good day. got through a session and i feel more prepared and optimistic about my abilities. and i thought the video was pretty entertaining in the end actually. damnit, i'd pay to watch myself.

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had pretty little sleep preparing for the session today... perhaps i was little over-enthusiastic in trying to impress.

anyway, after some swimming i had a bus ride back and there's this magnificent version of sleep where you're listening to music and you just drift off to sleep. you don't fuss about being tired, you don't worry about whether you can get to sleep or what you have to do for the rest of the day. friday afternoon, work done, just sleep. reminds me of someone who told me once that the greatest joy in the world is to be able to tire yourself out and then fall into the most blissful sleep imaginable.