Awful. A disaster. It's unclear whether I would have made a more favorable intellectual impression (a) giving the talk I gave or (b) had I just stood up there, wet myself, and stared vacantly at the audience until someone came up and helped me out of the room.
And, yet, still not as bad as the presentation I gave at the CDHA* brownbag a few weeks ago. There, my presentation has been officially classified by some agency in The Hague as a crime against humanity, and I have been instructed to assemble a list of attendees so that I can send them all reparations.
* [C]enter for the [D]emography of [H]ealth and [A]ging, at the University of Wisconsin.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
At least you didn't burst out crying at the end, which is what I did at my first brownbag presentation at Madison Sociology. Mind you, I was a first year student, not a professor. Still, I think a little more sharing of the love and the pain would improve brownbags immensely, I think. Favorable intellectual impressions? Bah!
Many of the Madison sociology professors, especially the demographers, seem to take perverse pleasure in tearing apart student presenters' presentations in brownbag. Half the time their criticisms are more nitpicky than substantive, and I often feel as though the professors who are most vocal in their destructive criticism are the ones who paid the least attention to the presentation.
Sometimes it seems like decision on professors' raises or tenure are made based on how frequently they get students to cry during their brownbag presentations.
FYI: Tenure, so far as I know, is not at all based on making students cry. Raises aren't either, in the sense that a raise is usually regarded as a permanent increase in salary. What we do get, if the student bawl as a result of a comment we make in brownbag, is a flat payment of $50, with another $25 if the crying is not just silent sobbing but also includes at least one desolate wail.
what do you get if you make fellow faculty cry? a $100 bonus? a gold watch? or is it simply knowledge of a job well done?
Post a Comment