Throwback Thursday: Barefoot in the Faculty Lounge
The college semester is starting up again although I lucked out with an extra week of prep time thanks to Martin Luther King Day. Here’s a throwback post for all of my professorial friends (of both the adjunct and non-adjunct variety).
In my infinite wisdom, I decided to wear my (fake) snakeskin peep toe stilettos this morning. Why? Well, I was teaching my first summer class of the semester. And my experience with summer semesters is that the students don’t really want to be there, even less so than regular-semester students.
As such, I decided to head them off at the pass with my very best power suit (to show them that I mean business), and orange juice and donuts (to show that I am nice and approachable and care about their well being).
I teach in heels all the time. I like heels. They make me feel older and more put together than I actually am and usually, they’re not a problem. But I failed to take into account that this morning’s lecture, on account of the condensed summer schedule, was a four hour lecture. Four hours and five minutes, to be precise.
I also failed to predict that the computer would not be working, that the projector would be upside down (how does a projector even get upside down???), that the IT folks wouldn’t actually be answering their phones at 7:45am, that I would spill my travel mug of Echinacea tea not once but twice (including directly on top of my flash drive) and that my delivery of first day handouts from the print shop would be three and a half hours late, forcing me to run up and down the stairs every 45 minutes to check my mail box.
(Thank God for films and small group discussions.)
And yet somehow, none of my students left early. None of them fell asleep. None of them even checked their phones during class. They even managed to guess the four-subfields of North American anthropology on their very first day of class without any help from me (well, okay, I did have to do a little humming of the Indiana Jones theme song to steer towards “archaeology” but they managed “physical” “linguistic” and “cultural” all on their own.)
It was a minor miracle. Seventh time’s a charm perhaps?
Kat Echevarría Richter 
2 Responses to “Throwback Thursday: Barefoot in the Faculty Lounge”
I always enjoy class more when the instructor is in heels. 😉
Im so glad you were able to manage teaching in heels for 4 hours and everything else went well. You must have been in so much pain when you got home though