Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Blogging Summer Teaching

I return to Berkeley today to begin the first of two six-week intensives in the Rhetoric Department. For the next twelve weeks I'll be lecturing three hours in a row for three days in a row. Teaching these intensives is always, well, intense, and usually preoccupies my attention throughout the summer, and so rather than allowing the blog to languish utterly during the week I am thinking it might be nice to gather my thoughts here before lecture, to give readers more of a sense of what I do when I do what I really do. No promises that I'll stick to this exercise, but well begun is well done.

I received my PhD from the Rhetoric Department, a decade ago now, and I also got my start start teaching undergraduates there, two decades ago! Returning always feels like a homecoming. Despite all that, as always, facing the forty or so students enrolled for the course I will be jolted with stage fright like a lightning bolt -- it doesn't matter if I've conversing with four graduate students in comfy chairs around a seminar table or addressing three hundred undergraduate spotlit in an auditorium, the stage fright is always there and always the same, compelling my preparations and then propelling my voice from my head into my mouth.

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