After coming/going back to Minnesota for the last two weeks of August I had to return to Wellington and teach. Such are the obligations of being employed to do just that. On account of a Saturday wedding in Minnesota I booked my ticket back to Wellington for Sunday. After flying over the dateline I was scheduled to get to Wellington at 8am on Tuesday. Having booked the ticket before I knew my teaching schedule I was effectively taking a 1/5 chance I'd miss a class, and a 1/5 chance I'd fly in and have to teach that day.
I got lucky, and my scheduled arrival time of 8am and lecture at 11am gave me 3 luxurious hours before I had to front up and tell my students about the Progressive era and the New Zealand Liberal government, and how modern life began in about December 1910 (at least, according to Virginia Woolf). While I was in America I got absurdly astonished reactions from people who thought that this plan to travel for 27 hours, and then give a lecture was a little too brave. While I'm using my New Zealand-United States comparative history class as an opportunity to impart the wisdom that you shouldn't rush to generalizations about national character, I will. Courtesy of New Zealand's isolation, long plane flights are a fact of life, and New Zealand people just get somewhat used to the idea of jetting in from halfway across the world, and working straight away. Most Americans aren't used to the idea that a 12 hour plane flight is just normal. Indeed, one of my colleagues, having done a similar thing a few weeks ago, told me that the lecture is easy, it's the discussion section/seminar/tutorial where you have to think on your feet that will get you ...
Two weeks of astonished Americans later I got back to Auckland airport, fortified with their astonishment, and determined to show that I was hard core enough to front up to class 3 hours after my 27 hour journey across the world. But I bumped into a colleague at Auckland airport who was just off the plane from Chicago, and heading for Wellington too, and it turned out that he was lecturing at 10am ... I wasn't even the most hard-core-traveling-lecturing person on the plane!
Lectures are easy. You just read a piece of paper and remember to cue up the next Powerpoint slide. Discussions are harder with mild jetlag. That's why you watch a video in the afternoon discussion section, so you only have to discuss articles for 45 minutes, rather than 2 hours.
All in all the arriving at 8, lecturing at 11 idea went very well, so well that I'll do it again when I have the chance.
Posted by eroberts at September 7, 2007 6:32 AM