Monday mornings

St. Louis, MO

 

Mental note: try not to accept speaking engagements on Monday mornings.  Especially in large gymnasiums with hard chairs and bad sound systems.  I might have been more popular if I had simply inserted pliers into people’s mouths and started pulling.

 

Perhaps Mondays should just be cancelled.  But then, Tuesdays would be Tuesdays.  Kind of like if babies had red eyes and giant ears, we would consider that to be “cute.”  It’s a survival mechanism that is bred into us.  It couldn’t really be any different.

 

Anyway, I usually don’t have a problem with teaching on a Monday.  Most of my students are actually either excited or relieved to be back at school.  For most of them, it is a safe, stimulating and social place, especially compared to their weekends.

 

But this morning was tough.  I had quite a few of those (tap tap) “is this thing on?” moments.  Ouch.  Not used to that.  I had people up and moving and tried to include interaction, but finally just gave up on that, opting to just plow through and give the rest of the presentation lecture-style.

 

With my students, I would have had a couple of advantages that I didn’t have today:  1.) a personal relationship with each of them to draw upon, 2.) more flexibility with how I presented concepts, and 3.) about 320 less people.

 

There are plenty of things about this year that I won’t miss too much.  These are a few of them.