Feelin’ Hot, Hot, Hot

Feelin’ Hot, Hot, Hot

It’s been a hot month here on the hilltop. My pattern has been to spend the early morning catching up on news and perhaps writing my daily story, then go work outside doing something on some project or other for the late morning hours, working up a sweat. Then, after a dip in the spa or cooling shower, I go into the coolness of the house to do my serious work. Sometimes that’s CEO ho-ha, sometimes that’s expert witness work (100 hours of that in August), sometimes it’s ghost-writing my friend’s daughter’s autobiography, and sometimes its preparing for my upcoming teaching gig that starts in late September. The point is that I leave the indoor work for the hot afternoons and try to get some physical outdoor work done in the morning when its cooler. That pattern has worked pretty well for the summer and I have managed to do what CEO work needed doing, I completed a 45-page expert rebuttal report, and I finished ghost-writing the book with what I believe was a modicum of success. What I haven’t done is prepare my course.

I am now three weeks from the start of my little one-credit course with ten students. I honestly have nothing to worry about since I taught at the graduate level for ten years and specifically taught this course for three of those years. I taught it in five three-hour weekly lectures. I have 602 PowerPoint slides to draw on, so much of the material I need to teach this course is gathered. I have only modest concern about the materials being out of date since this is a case study in project financing and the basic lessons of the financing, the approval process, the design and construction issues and the marketing and operations hurdles have not changed except for a bit more perspective. So how hard could it be to recut this course material for Fall 2020?

Once I had reviewed the 602 slides and grouped them into topics so that I could consider how I wanted to lay out the material and what lessons I want to develop, it all seemed quite manageable. But I know this much about teaching graduate students and it’s that you cannot give them mere facts or pablum. I do not want to assume that University of San Diego students are any different from Cornell students and Cornell students were quite demanding in terms of wanting to get their money’s worth and still be engaged and entertained. There is only one way I know how to do that and that’s with hard work and effort. I have to re-script the narrative to tell an interesting story using the materials I have at hand and my memories of the most interesting things that occurred over seven years between 2011 – 2018. There are tons of interesting stories, but as any good storyteller knows, these have to be teased out of the memory banks by reliving the narrative. The good news is that given the long historical timeframe, any gaps either in my memory or in the interest level of the story can be “enhanced” and “embellished” to serve the purpose of the course and the learning experience.

Preparing lectures for a course is exactly like telling a story. There has to be a beginning, a middle and an end and there has to be a narrative arc that builds and climaxes in synch with the timing of the course. Usually I have been able to write my lectures as though they are separate short stories that connect to form a complete storyline. The problem with that is that it is harder than normal to estimate the timing of this course, taught entirely in a virtual manner. I’m not sure its much more of a cipher than it was starting to lecture in 2007 and wondering how I would fill up three hours in front of a classroom of students. But you learn how to do that and then you have a week to recalibrate for the next lecture. This time I end at 9pm on Friday and start again on Saturday at 9am…and then do it all again the next Friday and Saturday. That’s not a lot of recalibration time, so I am going to develop the course like it is one big long lecture for fifteen hours, knowing that it will get broken up into four sessions and that there will be breaks and student involvement as we go. But it really does need to be done as a continuum since I have no clue at this moment how to gauge the timing and use of my slides and stories and how long they will take. The only way to do that is to go over and refine the lecture over and over again. That requires more work than you might think. If its a fifteen hour lecture, it will have at least thirty hours going through it to make tweaks and changes even now that I have outlined the flow I want to achieve.

An experienced professor knows that it takes 4-5 hours of preparation to make a one hour lecture. I plan to improve on that significantly. I am also expecting that I need to build into my slides the signals and clues that lead into the critical lessons and the stories that do the best job of engaging and entertaining while developing the knowledge storyline. As of today, I have eighteen days to make this happen. I’ve already done about 25% of the recasting, so there’s still lots to go. But I have a plan. I hate waiting until the last minute. Too much anxiety in that for a guy who is doing this for the pleasure more than the money. I plan to have the full lecture done this weekend so that I can spend the next two plus weeks refining and practicing. But I’m in luck. After a week of pleasant cooler weather, the temperature is rising for the next two days to the hottest level of the year at 104-105. That pretty much means that there will be no pleasant time of the day to do any outdoor work….or even any garage work with the portable fan on. I will be forced to stay indoors, which means I can focus my attention of getting the full fifteen hours of lecture organized, refined and completed.

Being in tune with nature means many things, but in this case, my work needs are in tune by allowing me to have two days of mandatory indoor heat-related exile to finish my tasks at hand. The only part of this exercise that I still wonder about is how happy I will be reliving all the travails of the New York Wheel only to have to maintain my psyche to give a lively course on it in a few weeks. As it turns out, I have been prepped for this a bit by virtue of a little contractor lawsuit that I have been named in. It’s funny, I had virtually nothing to do with the claims since this was a contractor chosen by the major investors, managed by the major investors and when I was finally sidelined, they did whatever they did to each other. But I am enjoined regardless and have to relive some of that nonsense while I prepare to teach this course.

One of my opening gambits in this course will be to emphasize that we all learn much more from failure than from success. I believe that, but I still wouldn’t blame any student for wondering if they were learning good or bad lessons from the process. I am feeling good about the upcoming experience of this course, so I’m feelin’ hot, hot, hot to get going.