First Lecture

Gave my first lecture at ASU this Thursday to a big, ~150 or so person audience (out of the 250 who are supposed to be in the class) in Bio 311 AKA "Biology & Society." The lecture was Cancer: Genes & Environment, though I started it with a focus on general genetic diseases and environment in an effort to get them to understand just what a large, complex and interactive relationship the two domains have. I found out last week that my lecture was to be split in two, which worked out well because it let me go very slowly through the diseases and convey a lot of the particular details that make them difficult to think about in just gene v. environment terms. I'll follow up next Thursday with the section of the talk that discusses mechanics of cancer. Here's a typical slide; if you really want the powerpoint for some bizarre reason, I can e-mail it to you:


Funny things about the lecture:

• I started it with the David Foster Wallace joke: two fish are swimming in a pond, an older one swims up and asks "How's the water?" The two fish look at one another and say, "What the hell is water?" I then repeated the joke, this time substituting the class for the young fish, Manfred (the normal prof) for the older fish, and "environment" for water. No one laughed at either joke - expected - but I'm not sure if people got the point that it is very difficult to delineate that in which you are "swimming."
• In that spirit, I asked them to define what an "environment" is, which one person answered with, for all practical purposes, "it's the stuff that's around the animal." This actually served asa great answer because I could subtly point out ludicrous it was while also noting that it's the pretty typical answer you would get from anyone. Yeah.
  
• I also told the joke to end all jokes - I was discussing the fact that genes and environment is a false dichotomy, because we have no clean break between the two, and genes can serve as environments in some capacities and environments define what genes can be and do in others. I followed this up with "So be careful when dealing with dichotomies, because they can be misleading. There are dichotomies, and there are things that are not dichotomies, and dichotomies are bad.
• No one laughed, so I followed that up with, "Aw, that was funny and y'all don't even know it." Or something to that effect. *That* they laughed at.
• At one point I was talking about Huntington's Chorea, and a girl in the second row asked, "If Huntington's is autosomal dominant, kills you relatively early in life, and it exhibits anticipation (meaning that each generation tends to experience the disease at an earlier age), why hasn't it been selected against?" This would have been a great question if the topic hadn't been directly addressed in the reading they had been assigned to complete before class. I pointed this out, "Great question - actually, one of the articles that was assigned for class today, amazingly enough, addresses that exact idea!" Busted! Much blushing and embarrassment! I then assuaged her fears, "Just kidding, don't worry, I know you have busy schedules and you don't always get to every article. :)" Yes, I managed to say an emoticon.
• I had a slide titled "What is cancer?" with a picture of Milton Bradley. Not only did no one laugh, no one even asked, "why is there a picture of a baseball player on this slide?" I am now worried that everyone thinks that Milton bradley has cancer and not that he is the answer to the question, 'What is (a) Cancer (to the Chicago Cubs)?"
  

I'm sure there are other things I'm forgetting. It went very well; I got a lot of different class members participating with questions and answers, so everything was much more vibrant than the lectures have been typically, and people seemed very interested. SO yay for our side. On the flip, though, the thing that was not funny or good or anything was the waking up at 3 the morning of, the feeling nauseated, etc. Sheesh - I mean, it's the first time I've lectured to that size of a crowd, but I've certainly spoken publicly lots fo times sans problem. Hopefully it was just the "first time in my chosen career" sort of issue, but I had a bad feeling that was going to happen: from the moment that I saw my lecture date was Thursday Sept. 17th, I knew Wednesday Sept. 16th was going to be a bad night of sleep. What are you gonna do?

Anyways, went well, very energetic and conversational, and I only noticed one person in the first ten rows or so who fell asleep. I'm pretty happy about it, and it was good to remember that hey, even though I spend all my time doing research and reading, the whole original point was teaching in a addition to that stuff - so it was great to get out in the real classroom environment and be able to do it.

And on that note, on to the next project...