Courses? Of Course!
I thought I would fall sick yesterday, but in the end I don’t even though I slept at 3 AM last night–thanks to Redoxon Double Action Vitamin C + Zinc and lots of water intake.
You stay up until 3 AM when you felt you were falling sick?
Oh yes. I was trying to formulate a lesson plan for the Macromedia Flash course I was conducting today.
Oh yes, out of pretty cool circumstances, I was chosen to become the instructor for the Flash course today.
Not that I was really good at it though.
I love teaching. I really do.
But what I actually prefer is tutoring a person one-on-one, something like showing a person how to actually do those fancy tricks in Flash.
What I was expected to do was actually get in front there and show a group of people how to do things in Flash.
This was a little bit of a problem, because I’ve never conducted such a lesson before, and although I spent the last few hours of the previous night to prepare for the lesson, I was still not sure whether the way I explained was easy to understand. True, throughout the Basic course I was pretty nervous and went through the things too slowly. Add this to the fact that I’m used to Macromedia Flash MX while the application taught was Macromedia Studio MX 2004, which is a tad bit different from the first.
I ended up panicking, causing J, the Visual Arts Society’s chairman, to actually continue the course.
I took a little break and by the time I came back, J had already started with the Advanced course.
This time, I was more confident, because in this course I was only expected to teach some tricks to do with Flash, instead of actually going through the tools.
Still, I didn’t really prepare this, and certain fundamental mistakes crept in. (Sometimes it’s a little difficult to explain the tricks when you’re so used to them such that you actually don’t really think too much about the process of doing it). I had to apologise quite a bit to the students throughout the course.
(Actually, it would help much if we actually had a projector in the room so that I can show them how to do things. I had to actually rely on drawing on the board to explain!).
But at the end of the day, I guess it was good for everyone. The society obtained quite a few of good reviews. The students learnt quite a lot, and I myself obtained quite a fair amount of experience.
Tomorrow the Basic lesson will be conducted by HM, a sub-committee member from Comics Ensemble, while I’ll take over Advanced course together with J (this is another J), the Designers Club chairperson. Both Designers Club and Comics Ensemble are sub-clubs of Visual Arts Society, by the way.
So… Wish us luck! Hope that HM, J, and myself won’t be nervous, and that tomorrow’s course will be an even more successful one!
bcc
January 28th, 2005 at 7:24 am
Teaching is not as easy as it seems, eh?
Don’t worry. It’ll get easier with time and practice. The trick is to know what you’re talking about. Or at least make it as if you know what you’re talking about.
Out of curiousity, how many people were in the course you teach? There were 40+ people in my classes. I hate talking in front of >10 people. :p
January 28th, 2005 at 9:20 am
nxva: There were about 20 people in the classes. I guess it was pretty hard for me to prepare what I was going to talk about with only a one-night notice.
January 29th, 2005 at 5:45 pm
u said, ‘i love teaching’..teaching what bud?? :P:P:P
January 29th, 2005 at 6:06 pm
yunita: anything i have an experience on.
it feels good to share experiences. ^^