Today I gave my first lecture. It was to a class of about 150 students, on the social psychology of groups, with a particular focus on the fairly well-known Robbers Cave experiment.
The lecture was not of my design – I was delivering one of Jim’s, but I had the opportunity to make it my own beforehand, and did so, making many significant changes to the powerpoint slides and building my own presentation around them. It helped that it’s quite a fun lecture – the Robbers Cave study involved rambunctious 12-year old boys raiding each others’ campsites and fighting snakes, so it holds the attention well.
It went fine. I was a bit nervy at the start but settled down pretty fast, and was completely comfortable by the second half. Somehow or other I got it to run exactly to time, as well, which was quite remarkable.
So, how about that. If you’d told me this time last year I would be giving a lecture now, I would have thought it quite unlikely. Just goes to show how much I know where I’m going with my life, what what?
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Headline, page 3 of the Dom Post Monday: “Maori shame at abuse of toddler”. Highlighted quote: Maori have turned into “the most ugliest (sic) and violent people ever”. (That noted, I was surprised to find myself agreeing with the director of NZ’s Family First organisation, who called for “a non-political commission of inquiry into child abuse, increased support for parenting groups and community organisations working with at-risk families”.)
4 thoughts on “My First Lecture”
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Hooray for lecturing! Did you have a microphone which you were able to rock? The acoustics would have to be quite good for a lecture to be easily audible for 150 peeps without a mic, but entirely possible I suppose.
I like to rock upon microphones. Oh yes indeedy.
Nice one Morgue! Go you! If you are still doing this in 6 months’ time, I’m totally gonna sneak in to one of your lectures….
If you let me know where and when your next lecture is, I might be able to come and be cheering section. 😉
But seriously, you’re a psych major, and I have a psych question.
Has anyone studied what the cognitive effect on people’s brains is of learning to read? Is there a difference when they learn to read silently, and as a step up, silently without moving their lips? Does it change with the type of writing, for instance Chinese script which has a large number of characters that must be memorised first, compared to English script which is semi-phonetic. What about Deaf people who grow up only Signing (as opposed to Oralism)? Does learning how to write change anything in people’s brains on top of that?
I was just thinking about a story by Augustine of Hippo (later the saint) who walked in on his teacher Jerome (also later the saint), and being astonished that Jerome, an astonishingly educated man, could read without saying the words out loud. He still had to move his lips, though. So that’s one of the brainiest men of his time not being able to take reading silently for granted, which face it, we all do. And I know that part of that is the legibility of handwritten manuscripts, but still, I was curious.
Thanks for all the kind words everyone! It was just a one-off fill-in lecture, but now that I’ve done one and not completely messed it up, there might be more fill-ins to come.
Steph: your question is fascinating. Off-hand I don’t know much; I know there’s a bunch of research into the cognitive processes going on behind silent reading (a quick search of the PsycInfo database on “silent reading” brings up a thousand articles and books). As far as the history goes, I imagine there’s two main theories, one which would say it’s about relative prevalence of reading matter in the culture (see, for example, here: http://www.goines.net/Writing/silent_reading.html ) and the other which would say that genuine cognitive evolution has occurred, in the same way that Chomsky believes we have benefited from cognitive evolution predisposing us towards language.
This is all hypothetical and doesn’t get you anywhere, but I too find it fascinating. Will keep it in mind in times to come and see what I can find out…