PTSD

Doesn't everybody feel like this?

And people wonder why I sometimes wanted to throw Deep Fried FPP out the window during meetings. It's because this is what it felt like. Every time. Every single meeting. For two years.

Same goes for almost all my classes. Sorry, WeberMan. I tried, I really did.

The millisecond we encounter boredom our brain races, leaps, bounds, or flies in a totally new direction. Sometimes it tries to do all of them at once. It pursues any event it can seize upon that sparks interest and staves off boredom.

We want to focus. We need to focus. But our brain is constantly trying to stay entertained. It's as if our brain is coated with boredom repellant teflon. I disagree with Hallowell and Ratey. I am constantly bored, even when surrounded by things that I love to do, but it is worst in public. For me, trying to pay attention when I am bored is physically uncomfortable. My brain feels like it's trying to escape out my ear.

From The Splintered Mind

This is going somewhere, actually. Back to that guest lecture I gave last week, the one with the chalkboards. I realized at the end of it (after the prof asked me if I was a global thinker, but before I showed him my modified version of the IRAC casenote format, the one with the feedback loops and the attempts to track pragmatist legal thinking) that I had only seen one other lecturer act like I do in front of a class.

Remember, I'm in the 24th grade, so I've seen a lot of teachers.

But only one of them spent the class following something like this structure:

1. talk (introduction)
2. chalkboard #1 diagram of stocks and flows
3. class activity with handout
4. chalkboard #2 diagram of feedback loops
5. powerpoint lecture #1
6. chalkboard # 3 diagram of model factors
7. powerpoint
8. talk
9. chalkboard #1a diagram of feedback loops (revised)
10. class activity with model building
11. chalkboard #4 diagram of stocks and flows
12. powerpoint
13. class activity with model building
14. chalkboard #5 system model with class input
15. powerpoint lecture #2
16. talk
17. handout on modeling, with highlights
18. talk

If you're keeping score, that means that in an hour (fifty-five minutes, really, because I was a couple of minutes late, and there was a bit of introductory stuff from the prof), I spent an average of 3.3 minutes on each method of teaching, before moving on to a different one. And in reality, the system model exercise (#14) took about 15 minutes, and the initial class activity (#3) took about ten. Each of the little "talk" segments represent time spent talking about things that weren't part of the powerpoint lecture. I've left out any mentions of things totally unrelated to the subject at hand. There were several.

So did the students look confused because of the difficult subject matter? Or because I was giving them some form of academic whiplash?

In my defense, I was late arriving, which made me nervous and more jittery than normal. And I'd drank a couple of cups of coffee earlier while prepping the lecture, but then forgot to keep drinking coffee long enough to concentrate until after the lecture. So this is worse than usual.

I have been known to hold it together for up to 22.5 minutes at a time. As long as it was a hot bench. And I've given paper presentations that lasted as long as 30 minutes in classes. I think I even once gave a 45 minute introduction to the work of some theorist or other here at TUWSNBN.

But again, the coffee is important in those situations. Or No Doz. Whatever's handy. And the ability to stay on task means that I tend to err in the opposite direction, babbling on until people's eyes roll back in their heads.

I've got no setting for "interested, but not obsessive." It's either a fugue state or out-to-lunch.

The moral of the story? Under no circumstances should I be given a room with six chalkboards in which to speak. I have a hard enough time staying focused without the ability to roam freely while scribbling on the walls.

[I think it's fair to say that Priya and I have decided to agree to disagree about RENT. The rest of you should feel free to continue the discussion, though. Since I don't know where you live, you should be pretty safe.]

posted by Elizabeth @ 10:29 PM