My series of guest lectures came to an abrupt halt thanks to the audience being most unresponsive. I know stuff can be boring, but with every effort to make it interesting with pictures and illustrations and with new stuff for the kids I hoped they'd find it interesting. They found it over the head and I did my best to reach them and make them ask doubts, talk to me, respond to queries, opine, suggest, whatever.
Nothing useful came out and I decided that I was being taken for an old geezer. I spent at least 6 waking hours (considering I've been sleepy all the while strangely) preparing the presentations. Consecutive guest lectures are a bad idea if the audience isn't appreciative of the effort taken to prepare a presentation or lecture for them. The one I'm referring to was on Memory Management and was comprehensive, utterly simple and only a sleepy absent audience could ignore it and they did.
"Who in their right mind would ever need more than 640K of RAM!?" Bill Gates, 1981. That's exactly what these kids are thinking right now. Down with MMUs and Virtual Memory.
My next one was to be on algorithmic complexity analysis. I doubt they can take much math and it takes time to prepare slides on math, easier to write down on a board with chalk. So what the heck, indefinitely postpone the presentation - that's the best thing. Let them finish their course and I can then find out if they really know algorithmic complexity. Guys are shy to talk because they'd be labeled nerds. Girls don't want to be non-girly. Barf!! What is the point of lecturing people who don't think it's useful? Lose-Lose for both sides, best solution - avoid it.
my God i'm afraid. as a part of my project, i've to present about RBI's working to school chidren. I think they are goin to sleep however:)
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