short about the lecture

I was asked a couple weeks ago to give a lecture at the school by Kitty, the head of the English student union organization. There weren't any details about the content except that it should be around 90 minutes and about whatever I wanted. In my classes I incorporate some lecture, but for the most part, there's a lot of discussion and interaction. I thought about how I could talk constantly about something for 90 minutes and make it interesting at the same time and realized it required a lot of planning.

The lecture was scheduled for 7:00 PM this night, and in typical Phil fashion, I started working at 4:30. I had told Kitty the topic would be culture, but in order to give myself some leeway so I could change the content in the future if I wanted to, I didn't tell her much of the specifics about what exactly about culture I would be talking about. I wasn't worried though. I wasn't going to be reviewed in any way and I knew that even without any planning I easily make a 90 minute speech about culture.

I figured it should be a lecture about something students were curious about. I haven't seen a Chinese teacher's lecture, but according to other students, all of the lectures from Chinese teachers are pretty dull. It's essentially a professor at a podium speaking for 90 minutes. It was a Friday night and I know I wouldn't want to attend a lecture held by a foreign teacher about something strictly academic, so I decided it I would try to keep it light. The biggest thing was making sure I didn't stand and talk like the Chinese teachers, but I love to be dynamic when I'm on stage so that was the least of my worries.

Knowing students absolutely love to look at pictures and are incredibly curious about traveling and foreign culture, I took about 45 of my nearly 2,500 travel pictures on my computer into a powerpoint separated by information slides about culture:


-Culture is what makes us different
-Culture makes our cities different
-Culture is our ideas about religion
-Culture is what gives us ideas about what is acceptable and unacceptable, what is good and bad, and what is funny and not funny
-Culture is the food we eat
-Culture is what we like
-Culture is also what we don't like
-Culture makes us friendly

After each slide I put in some pictures from my travels. I explained the pictures and told some stories surrounding them. The time when I got my cell phone stolen with a friend while sneaking back into estadio nacional after leaving to buy pisco got the best response. I used some pictures of dishes from Chile and Egypt for 'the food we eat' and the pictures of the protests in Chile for 'what we don't like'. Man, I love those protests.

I ended with a slide about what I have learned from traveling:
What have I learned?
-Culture is a beautiful thing
-We are all different, and culture is what makes us different
-You cannot get rid of your culture
-We need to respect other cultures

The whole thing went flawlessly. I couldn't have asked for a better response. After my speech, which lasted about 60 minutes, I opened it up for questions, of which there were a number and I had to end the Q&A session myself after about 20 minutes to prevent it from dragging on. There were lots of laughs (exactly what I wanted), and afterwards lots of people came up, asked to take a picture, and thanked me. I then took some of my students who had come to the lecture out to eat some hot pot and a local restaurant.

I also heard one of the English teachers, described by Kitty as 'plump', is interested in my new online newspaper for students: www.cwnutimes.com. I'm not sure in what capacity, but it'd be nice to have a Chinese English teacher around to help or maybe write some articles. I've put a lot of time into the website so I hope it's successful. The first meeting is on the 13th, and I've been actively promoting it by telling other teachers and students to put up flyers and inform their classes. I have absolutely no idea how many people will show up on Wednesday.

In all:
a great day.