That's Not Funny

I think one of my professors this term is going to present some problems. I won't identify the course or the professor.

I've spent years in front of groups of people giving technical presentations of various flavors. I know an awful lot about managing those kinds of events. For example, it is important that the speaker "take charge" or "own" the space. Move tables or microphones if you need to. Change the lighting. Ask your listeners to change seats. The time and space is yours and you need to be comfortable in it.

It is also important to establish credibility. This is usually done long before you arrive at the venue by sheer fact that you have been invited to that place to share what you know about a particular topic. You are the expert. There is rarely any need to state your credentials or experience as part of your presentation or in the presentation materials. There are exceptions to this but you have to be a pretty damned special speaker. 99.99% of technical talks do not require anything more than your name somewhere after the title.

If your audience is not open to your ideas, you might need to establish gravitas. This is somewhat different than credibility. It is part of "owning" the space. You need to "own" the conversation too. This sounds adversarial when I write it out this way, but you can generally do this with tone of voice and body posture.

And even if you are a standup comedian firing off one-liners every 30 seconds, you still need to have a flow to your material. There need to be signposts within your material to indicate important points and changes of direction. These can take many forms, and can be also be handled with a variety of shifts in voice tone and body position and posture.

I don't intend to write an essay on how to deliver a technical talk. But I wanted to give you a flavor for the intricacy of details that a good speaker will consider and use in his talk.

Back to this problematic professor.

Are you familiar with the comic Lewis Black? If you aren't, stop reading and go watch some of his stuff on YouTube. He looks like he's about to have a stroke half the time but his stuff is pretty funny.
Funny when delivered as standup comedy.

This professor apparently believes that he channels Lewis Black and I can tell you without hesitation that Lewis Black is not funny when you have to listen to an hour of him every day of the week and he's trying to explain complicated technical matters.

This guy uses the same emphatic, jerky body motions, the same bombastic shouting followed by whispers, and a lot of profanity (Black's famous for his constant use of "fuck"). He stalks back and forth at the front of the class, using his body to physically intimidate those in the front row. Every few minutes, he veers off into random stories that nearly always involve physical violence to people or animals and that have little relevance to the technical matter at hand. He demanded that everyone in the class sign an "agreement" not to talk during class (unless spoken to by him) or face removal from the class. He said it was a matter of "respect." He called the class "you little bastards" this morning. Yep, a whole lot of respect going around.

The first day he listed all of his credentials, degrees, post-docs, years and dollar amounts of funded projects--and challenged us to try and disagree with anything he would subsequently say in class. He doesn't "own" the space, he pisses over everything in sight. His random stories are not signposts. They are confusing and distracting. He yells at us when we write or type things as he talks--"you don't need to write this down!" I really don't like being told how to learn or study or organize information.

The professor even said something the first day about being like Lewis Black, so I think he is aware of at least some of these behaviors. I think he does some of this on purpose. If so, he has to be one of the more unpleasant academics I've met in quite a while.

I've decided to wait for the first exam before doing anything about this. At a minimum, he is creating a hostile learning environment. I suspect that his department head is a weak leader or this guy would have been reined in long ago. So complaining might be a waste of time.

Don't get me wrong. I have a pretty strong stomach for these sorts of things. I am not looking for problems. But I'm paying a ton of money to take these classes and I expect something a little more coherent for my dollars.