How the lecture went (hooray!)

Well, I’ve had a wonderful time in Aarhus, and it’s about time to head home. Tomorrow, Friday, I take the train to Copenhagen and fly back to Seattle on Saturday. I’ve got some time to kill before the activities class today, so I’ll write a few blog entries to get posted in retrospect about what I’ve done this week.

The main reason I came was to give a lecture to a class in the business school on Monday, and—thank goodness!—that went great. I forget how much I like teaching when I’m not regularly in a classroom… It was a good-sized lecture hall, and the class is 90 students, though not every student was in attendance. Still, it was a different sort of setting than I’m used to. I had to use a mic to be heard. Wild. Anyway, my slides looked fine, and the students seemed attentive. In fact, I could see most of their faces pretty well, and they were interactive enough that I could pause and look at a student and ask if she had a question when she looked puzzled, and she’d speak up and ask for clarification. That was great. I hate presenting in a vacuum. During the lecture, there were a few times that I asked the students to identify examples of the concepts I’d been discussing, and people spoke up readily. I really appreciated that. Afterwards, Connie (the prof who invited me here) said she had “nothing but effusive praise” for the lecture, and her teaching partner said that it was exactly what the students had needed to hear, so I was thrilled.

After class, a few of the girls who sat right down front stayed to talk about how to apply some of the lecture concepts in their class project, and the teaching partner and I chatted with them for quite a while. It was pretty fun to brainstorm and discuss things with students who are really interested. One of the girls asked me why I’d come to Aarhus, and I told her that I’d like to get a job at the university here when I graduate, and she said, “Oh, great! Then if we get our Master’s degree, you could be our teacher!” Of course that made me feel like a million bucks.