It's official - I don't totally suck at lecturing

While I'm working on sorting out the photographic highlights of the Spain field trip, I though I'd share some more good news with you. Student feedback from one of the courses I lectured last semester is in. One of the things the students are asked to do is to rate each lecturer, with possible scores ranging from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent). My mean score was 3.8. Not great, but I was expecting much worse!

This has cheered me up no end - these were my first lectures, and I learnt an awful lot from them: the importance of preparation, of having a coherent narrative, and the judicious use of worked examples and case studies. Talking to some of the students on this field trip (who I lectured in a different course) also provided me with some useful feedback, reminding me how easy it is to pitch the level just too high - perhaps by not properly explaining terminology - and therefore lose a large part of the audience (which may not bode well for the feedback from that course...). It was a precipice-like learning curve, and I wasn't particularly confident that I'd ascended fast enough to really be any use at all, especially after seeing the students' exam papers. Knowing I wasn't too appalling, whilst realising that I can do much better with a bit of work, is helping to ease my current existential crisis.