I had to give a presentation last semester as the culmination of a class that I was taking. The silly thing was that the class was a class I took in order to be able to be the teaching assistant for a different class. I didn’t learn anything from the TA class. They basically told us to treat our teaching project like a research project, which I found to be pretty much the least helpful bit of advice I’d ever gotten. I was the TA for a playwriting class. There’s nothing like research about that. You just can’t put that spin on it. It’s a workshopping class on trade shows.

 

The presentation, as it turned out, was actually structured like a research fair. We all had our big posters on exhibition stands, big easels, kind of like a trade show stand. And the posters kept falling down because gusts of wind would come through the room, or because the stand construction wasn’t terribly sound on all of the fair stands then they would collapse sometimes. Nobody knew where to go or what the topics of any of the projects were, in large part because the exhibition design was just poor: there was no logical grouping to any of the projects and no labels. I’m not complaining too much about the exhibition stand design, mine was okay, but is it really too much to ask to have a slightly coherent exhibition design?

                                

Then we had to walk around and evaluate everybody’s posters and answer questions about our own. The point, again, was to simulate research fairs that we might participate in should we continue on the academic path, but frankly, I don’t see the point in pretending that what we’re doing is research just so that we can have a mock research fair. It isn’t research, and the setup of a research fair isn’t that confusing, so why not just wait until you’re doing actual research?

 

I imagine I’m going to have to do something similar for the project this summer. Have some sort of “Exhibition Germany” to talk about the “research” we’ve done there, which won’t really be research at all – or not formal research, anyway. Oh, the hoops we jump through.