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This post is part of an ongoing series.

Video Lectures
I got to class about ten minutes early today, and spent that time setting up my laptop while the students filed in. I turned on the projector and got it ready to go, but I didn’t hook anything up yet because I didn’t want the distraction.

While I was getting that ready, though, one of my students spoke up from the back of the room and said, “Oh, hey, I tried to watch your video lecture online, but it wouldn’t work on my computer.” It’s a class full of Computer Science and Information Science majors, so of course suggestions were offered back and forth, but in the end I told him I’d been having trouble with it, too, so I’d keep looking into it and get back to him.

He said, “Well, anyway, it’s a good thing you also provided the written transcript. Keep doing that. Because that was really helpful.”

And I said, “Umm…I’m a Technical Writer. That’s my job. So, yes, I will.”

Opening Questions
Five minutes later I had all the students I was going to have (two shy of a full roster), so I turned to my outline. The first item on it was, “Video lecture vs. written tutorial.” Half of the class had already heard the conversation, but I went ahead and revisited it, bringing the other half in. Turned out only two or three students had tried to use the video lecture, and only one of them had gotten it to work (and that one happens to work for the North Institute which is the non-profit group that designed and maintains the software all the rest of us are having trouble with). I promised the students I’d keep working on it, and let them know what I learned, and reiterated that the text tutorials will be available, and will be higher quality than my narrated slideshows anyway.

Partway through that, my helpful inside man piped up to tell me how to workaround the problems the others were having, and I made notes to myself to send out more detailed, step-by-step instructions later in the week. So my video lectures problem might be solved. We’ll see.

Syllabus Issues
I moved on from there to a discussion of the syllabus, which I opened up on the projector. We’d gone over it on the first day, briefly, but when we talked last week about due dates, I realized it was completely messed up. So I told them the new dates were available on the version of the syllabus online (and went over them in class).

I’d also forgotten to give them Fall Break — a fact which came to my attention while rearranging due dates, so I told them, “Oh. I’ve also graciously decided to let you to take Fall Break along with your fellow students.” That got a bigger laugh than it probably deserved, and then spawned some contention over one of the new due dates falling on Fall Break. Apparently they’re not happy with just getting out of a lecture and assignment. I told them I’d consider the issue and render my verdict next week.

Stand-up
One unexpected development in today’s class is that I stood up for most of my lecture(s). I’d decided after my first week that standing in front of the class was causing me anxiety issues (and then later Dad explained to me what was really causing it, but I didn’t think to correct my earlier assumption). Anyway, after that I decided to just sit at the teacher’s desk — front and center in the class — and deliver my lectures on eye-level with all my students.

Today, though, I was using my laptop on the overhead projector, which means I had to set it on the raised lectern off to the side, and I had to stand behind it to control the screen. I had been doing that while we discussed the syllabus — effectively hiding behind my laptop, which is precisely how I handle the anxiety at most family functions — but when I moved on to the mini-lecture I didn’t have any overhead material to back it up (at first).

So, without thinking about it, I stepped away from the computer, halfway between the lectern and my desk, and started talking to my students. It didn’t make sense to cross all the way to my desk, sit down and talk to them, just to jump up again two bullet points down so I could bring up my illustrations.

About midway between the first and second bullet point I noticed that I was standing up and lecturing, but I didn’t let myself dwell on it. When it came time for the big ugly main lecture at the end of the class period, though, I did the same thing deliberately, and I had no trouble with it. At least, not with the standing up part.

The Mini-Lecture
As I may have mentioned before, the course consists of Tuesday lectures on Topics in Tech Writing, and then Thursday tutorials and assignments that require the students to prepare specific document types (business letter, memo, resume, that sort of thing).

So today I brought that up — brought up that we’d been talking for two weeks about “document types,” and I said the reason that matters is because certain document types have an impact just by being that document type. In fact, I’d hinted at that in the tutorials for each of the documents types they’d done so far. Formatting a business communique as a recognizable Business Letter creates a certain expectation and context for your reader, before you ever convey the first word of your content. The same goes for a memo. I told them a good way to think of document types is by their “shape” — that is, the visual impact of a document that matches a particular style, and the response that style creates in a reader.

Haiku?
By way of illustration, I put some words up on the projector. It was a text document, in Notepad, so there was no formatting whatsoever. I’d even reduced everything to lower-case, at great personal pain. The first document looked like this:

schumann’s resonance
headgear for grasshoppers
eyes like headlights
friday
october 5
9:00 pm
p. j.’s
manhattan

I said, “Anyone know what this is?”

One of my Computer Science majors said, “A haiku?” I almost laughed at that. I’d actually had, “Gibberish? A poem?” in my own notes for possible student guesses.

I just said, “What about this?” and opened the second document.

the jackpot
10:00 pm
$5.00
eyes like headlights
daleria
the remember
january 5, 2008

Somebody said, “An advertisement, maybe?” I heard whispery voices treading dangerously close to the right guess, so I went ahead and put up the third document.

www.myspace.com/eyeslikeheadlights
eyes like headlights
cd release party
debut album
there’s no us in evolution
5909 johnson drive
mission, kansas
with left on northwood and rettig
friday, october 26
the mission theatre
all ages 21 to drink

That third line gave it away, and I said, “What I’ve got here is the text from a bunch of band flyers. That first one looked like complete nonsense when I showed you just the unformatted words, but you’d recognize the information instantly if I showed you this.”

“So,” I said, “what you can see here is that the words that go on a band flyer are totally meaningless until you put them in the shape of a band flyer.” And I hesitated for a beat, and smiled, and said, “So you’re going to put them in the shape of band flyer.”

The Band Flyer
I told them to divide into three groups — that I wasn’t playing the elementary school counting game this week — and none of them apparently learned from that last week because they opted to just stay divided up by their tables. So group one consisted of three English majors and a couple technical people, and then groups two and three were entirely technical people. It was incredibly lopsided, but it made for good teaching in the end.

I told them they could probably find the original flyer if they looked hard enough online, but that I didn’t want them to recreate the original. I wanted them to make their own. Each group quickly picked which software they were going to use to design the document (Picnic, Paint, and Word, respectively), and then selected one designer to actually build it.

Groups two and three mostly left their designers to do the design work single-handedly, while they went searching online — first for suitable background art, and then (out of sheer, perverse curiosity) for sordid details about the band Eyes Like Headlights (which, in case you’re curious, is one of Carlos’s old bands).

Time Management
I probably should have obfuscated my information before presenting it to the students. Some of the antics and lyrics associated with Eyes Like Headlights probably isn’t something I should be sharing with my students — at least from the Dean of Students’s point of view. They certainly didn’t mind. They found it hilarious.

I gave them twenty minutes, and group two dashed something off in Paint and were done in fifteen minutes (and that was just the designer — most of the rest of his group had tuned out around seven to eight minutes in, when they were confident in his work). Group three’s designer had a little more artistic input, and they took right up until the twenty-minute mark to submit their design. Group one, which boasted fully four designers overflowing with artistic vision, took most of thirty minutes to get their document submitted.

Sometime around minute twenty-seven, one of the girls looked up and said, “Wait, what kind of band are they?”

Everyone else already knew, because they’d been listening to tracks on myspace, but I looked at my cherished English major and said, “They’re progressive death metal.”

Her eyes shot wide, and she said, “Umm…well, we’re pretending that they’re Folk, for ours. Okay?”

Presentation and Discussion
So we finally got all three flyers in, and I put them up on the projector in order. Everyone was really impressed with group one’s heavily designed document, and no amount of prompting could get them to express what was wrong with it (apart from a couple elements that they’d forgotten). I had to point out that they got the band wrong. That, while they’d been determinedly working on the good design, good layout, good formatting that group two had just casually dashed off, group two had actually (goofing off) figured out what style the document should be. That’s research, and that’s a real, important part of Technical Writing.

Of course, the other groups caught on that group one’s flyer was beautifully designed. Ultimately, we decided group three had the best one for the band in question.

Object Lesson
One of the best lessons learned, though, came from a specific mistake the hasty group two had made. One of the lines on the poster, “with left on northwood and rettig,” referred to a couple other bands that were performing at the same show. Group two mistook that “left on northwood” bit as directions, and threw that line in the upper left corner with the address and the name of the venue. Same font, same style, and as soon as I put the flyer up on the overhead, someone from group three pointed out their mistake.

Honestly, when we got into the discussion stage, the designer for group two started looking a little sheepish, and I felt a little bad about that. Then we finished up the discussion and I launched into my big ugly lecture, where I was just trying to dump specific formatting rules on them.

One of the first points I made was that technical documents generally contain several discrete chunks of information, bundled together, and part of the purpose of formatting is to create a recognizable hierarchy to help readers quickly and accurately figure out which information belongs to which bundle, and to locate the bundle the reader actually needs.

And I’d said some words on the topic, then I pulled that group two flyer back up, and darted over to the screen, and said, “That’s what we saw right here. That’s what the flyers do, grouping all these individual sentences into sections, formatting them to show what is related, and how. And we saw that on this flyer. We all knew instantly that group two had gotten this wrong — had mistaken these two other bands for driving directions — because of nothing but the font and the position on the page. He grouped this line with these other lines, and that told us what he thought it meant.”

That was an excellent object lesson, that I could never have made up on my own. Even more importantly, though, the guy who had designed that document, who had been looking sheepish through all the ribbing over it, was nodding right along to my point. He got it, and that was awesome.

The Big Ugly Lecture
Dad told me not to do lectures — to focus on mini-lectures instead — and Gail said I’d done really well in the first week to focus on stories because students really connect to stories (and that’s great news, because I’m naturally a storyteller).

But in today’s class I needed to do an infodump. I needed to deliver certain rules, certain information, for them to use in all future classes. So after we’d finished our discussion of the class activity (which, I think, they really enjoyed), I stepped away from the lectern, turned to my notes, and told them how to format documents.

It was twenty minutes long, and I used their tutorial from last week for examples of every point I had to make. Apart from that one example harking back to their activity, though, I lost them for the lecture. They zoned out, and I could see it happen. I didn’t get panicky or anything — and I certainly didn’t get offended or deeply disappointed — but it was a little sad to see that happen when I’d spent so much of the last two class periods engaging them.

Still, lesson learned. I’m not exactly sure how I’ll address it in the future, but at the very worst, it was just a lecture. The sort of boring lecture every one of them has been through hundreds of times, in dozens of other classes. That’s not something I’m going to beat myself up over.

Names
I ended the lecture at 2:12, and started to dismiss them before I realized I hadn’t returned their marked-up assignments from last week. Then I said, “Look, I’m terrible with names. I’ve tried to learn all of yours, but just in case, I’m going to call them out as I hand out your letters.” And I did, and they dutifully raised their hands, but I realized pretty quickly I needn’t have done that. I knew them all. That’s something I’d been worried about, and I managed to get them all down with about ten minutes’ effort today, using their student ID photos and the Introduction Letters they’d turned in as their assignments last week.

So that was a positive experience. Really, the whole class was. Another great week. And, not only that, but a source of real confidence. Because now I know last week’s success wasn’t because of the material, or because of the activity, but because of the method. I repeated the same method to design my class this week, and it went pretty much the same way. That’s good news for future efforts.

Awesome. Awesome.

More next week.

Someday, one of my students is going to call me “Professor Pogue” (or maybe someone who really hasn’t been paying attention will even call me “Doctor Pogue”), and I’ll say, “No, please, call me Mister Pogue. Professor Pogue is my father.”

I’ll be the only one who laughs at that, but I will find it hilarious.

Seventy-five Minutes
As I mentioned before, my first week of classes probably felt like a wild success to my students, but I came out of there shocked and terrified about how I was going to fill seventy-five minutes with lecture every week.

And, of course, the answer I got repeatedly from seasoned professionals was, “Don’t.” Gail Nash recommended a short twenty-minute lecture to start the class, a half-hour in-class assignment, and then another twenty minutes at the end of class to discuss it. Dad recommended mini-lectures, no longer than fifteen minutes each, broken up with other activities and discussions.

One thing everyone told me, when I was panicking about how poorly that first class went, was that it would get easier once I got the students talking back to me. The problem I was running into was lecturing. It’s always difficult to deliver a message to a silent, unresponsive crowd, and especially so for somebody with no experience in public speaking whatsoever. One and all, they told me that if I could get the students to talk to me, it would be a breeze.

Getting Them Talking
Dad even told me how. Drawing on years of experience and a nuanced understanding of the student psyche, he said to start off your class by asking, “Okay, how do you guys feel about last week’s assignment (or lecture)? What didn’t you like about it?” That gets them talking, because everyone is more interested in complaining about something than in praising it. Give them a chance to vent (and provide what will be useful feedback to you as the teacher), and then follow up with, “Okay, and what did you like about it?” Then the students who had a positive experience with the assignment (or lecture) but otherwise would have remained quiet will chime in, partly because they’ve spent the last however many minutes listening to their classmates bash on it, and they feel a need to defend it. By that point, though, you’ve got everyone in your class talking, and comfortable with each other, and you can launch into new material and get good responses.

That advice struck me as so sound that it directly increased my confidence going into that class. I bragged about my dad’s genius to several people, for days before the class started. Then I showed up, put it into practice, and got…nothing. Not a word. No complaint, no praise. Nothing.

So I looked around the room, shook my head sadly, and said, “Guys, you’re going to have to talk to me. Otherwise it’s just me sitting up here at the front of the class, lecturing you about writing for seventy-five minutes. And you don’t want that. You know why? [Brief pause.] Because it’s seventy-five minutes.” That got a laugh, and it worked. After that, I got answers when I asked questions.

Business Letters
For their first assignment, they were to write me a Letter of Introduction, telling me a little bit about themselves and following the standard business letter format. To facilitate that, I prepared an online lecture (that ended up being just an illustrated tutorial, for technical reasons) going into detail on how to design a business letter.

So I started out the class lecture by talking to them about business letters, and why they’re useful. One of the things I discovered last week is that none of my students (not a one) has any intention of becoming a professional tech writer. That doesn’t bother me, but it means I’ve got to spend the semester demonstrating to them why this material matters to them.

For a first stab at that, I led off with three short stories, from my personal experience. I told them about the time I bought my first house, and along with it came the high pressure sales pitch to renew the security system that the previous owners had used. We’d initially agreed, but when we looked at our budget and saw how much they actually wanted per month, we called up to cancel it. The person on the other end of the line said, “I’m sorry, but we’re going to need that in writing.”

So I wrote a business letter.

Then, a few months after we moved to Tulsa, someone stole a bill for our Best Buy credit card out of our mail, and used it to ring up several thousand dollars in fraudulent claims. Freaking out, we called up Best Buy’s customer service and said, “Hey, someone’s stealing your stuff and trying to charge it to us, and you’ve got put a stop to it!” and the guy on the phone said, “I’m sorry, but we’re going to need that in writing.”

Then I told the students a little bit about the writing experience, the process of trying to make it as a novelist, and the unending string of query letters — every one an invitation for rejection. I told them about the importance of presenting the richness and beauty of a lovingly-crafted work of art in a sterile, one-page business letter. And then I told them how I’d finally landed a literary agent, and then had to fire her a year later, and when I contacted her to let her know I was no longer interested in working with her, she said, “I’m sorry, but I’m going to need that in writing.”

That got a big laugh. I really think it got my point across well, too. I told them that in each of those situations, in different ways, I was stressed out, and needed to communicate specific information clearly and quickly. And already having a set format, an easy template that just required me to fill in the blanks, made it far easier for me to do exactly that, and save my energy for the other things I needed to be worrying about.

Due Dates
We talked briefly about our class schedule — my plans for Thursdays and Tuesdays, and how the individual documents they’re producing fit into the document packets that I’m going to be grading. In the process of that, I discovered my timetable doesn’t work at all. I stumbled over that a little bit, thinking out loud, and that got some laughs. I think that’s a good thing. I do need to get the details worked out before next class, though….

Group Work
Next we moved into the in-class assignment. I said, “Okay, we’re going to work in groups now, and to divide up, I think we’ll use a method that I found to be very effective in grade school.” That got groans and chuckles, but they obediently counted off in threes, and then divided up into three groups per my instructions. Then I had everyone (for the first time) introduce themselves with name and major. Then I admitted why I’d had them count off in three — because my three English majors were all sitting right next to each other. As a result, I had three groups with each one consisting of four Computer Science or Information Science majors, and one English major. Or, in other words, four technical people and one writer person.

Not entirely fair to the English majors, but that’s how technical writing goes. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with another English major. I told them as much, and paused to double-check myself, and then nodded and said, “I’ve worked with a Journalism major, but never an English major. Don’t work with a Journalism major!” That got a laugh.

Technical Writing
Their assignment was deliberately vague. Every student at OC is issued a laptop, so I told them, “You’ve got twenty minutes. I want you to write me step-by-step instructions for how to do something useful on your student laptops.”

Then something amazing happened. I’d guess that half of my students probably work with OC IT, and most of the rest of them are computer people. So in each of the three groups I heard the computer people tossing ideas out. “We could do this.” “We could do that.” And in each group, I heard the English major say, “Wait, what? What is that?” And then the computer people explained it to them.

And then the English majors wrote it down.

Or, in other words, Tech Writing happened. It was a thing of beauty.

Graded by the Ridicule of Their Peers
I did warn them, just after they’d divided up into groups, “We’re going to go over these once you’re done, so you’ll be graded by the ridicule of your peers.” That got a laugh (which was a very good thing), but we all followed through on it. As they finished, they emailed their tutorials to me, and I put them up on the overhead.

We briefly analyzed each one, pointing out what was done well, and what needed work. I talked a little bit about audiences, and I told them about Mark at my first job starting off every software manual with a section explaining how to use a mouse and what “click” and “double-click” meant. That got astonished, disbelieving stares, and I think I was able to make a good point there.

Out of Time
I had a lot more to say about the usefulness of written tutorials, with some heavy emphasis on all these computer people who had to give family and friends instructions on simple tasks all the time. By the time we were done critiquing, though, I was down to five minutes left in class, so I rushed through that material and let them go.

What I didn’t get to was another personal anecdote, a story demonstrating the popularity and usefulness of tutorials, especially online. I was all prepared to tell them how I achieved some level of fame because of a short tutorial online. (If you search Google for “Alexpoet,” my onetime web moniker, my website is the top of the list because of a tutorial I wrote for XBMC Python scripting — which is another phrase that points directly to my page on Google.) I didn’t get to that, but next week’s class is about formatting technical documents, and most of what I did with that tutorial was take a flat text tutorial some Canadian dude had written, clean up the English, and apply the formatting rules I’d learned in my Tech Writing class. So, in other words, the material I didn’t get to this week becomes the object lesson next week.

The Teaching Experience
When I talked to Dad about my rough experience last week, one of the things he pointed out was that my sheer terror when I stepped up to the podium was caused by an acute awareness of myself. He said that would happen to anybody — even the most experienced public speaker, the most outgoing teacher — if he stepped in front of a crowd and spent the whole time paying close attention to what he was doing right or wrong and analyzing it. We’re too good at recognizing our own faults, we blow them out of proportion, and if that’s what you’re thinking about, you’re going to shut yourself down.

Dad said everything I described about my first experience fell perfectly into that condition, and I couldn’t argue with him. He said the way to fix it is to think about the students instead. Think about what they need to know, what I can tell them to make their lives better, and focus on their responses. I had my doubts about how easy it would be to follow through on that, but I spent the whole class trying to put it into practice, and it worked.

And I think it worked for everyone, not just for me. I mentioned the laughs I got, as often as I could, because they weren’t nervous laughter. I can be a funny guy, and when I made a sarcastic comment and the students laughed at it, I could tell they were at their ease. I think that happened as a direct result of my being more at ease, and it built on itself, so by the end of the class we really were just talking back and forth. I spent two days before the class wrestling with intense anxiety, and it was brutal right up until I cleared my throat and stammered awkwardly, “Umm, okay, I guess we should get started.” Then I took a breath, started with Dad’s question, “What didn’t you like about last week’s lecture?” and instead of feeling nervous that I’d asked a question they couldn’t answer, I just got irritated at them for not speaking up.

And from there on, I was fine. It was a great class period, and I think the lives of everyone involved are better for it.

More next week.