Way Less Scary Than Death

This week has been a particularly good one for highlighting how weird my career is. On Thursday, I gave a lecture for the Union College Academy of Lifelong Learning, talking for nearly two hours about Einstein (in Memorial Chapel, shown in the "featured image" above). On Friday, I drove clean across New York State (which is really big, for the record) so I could give my talking-dog quantum physics talk as the after-dinner lecture at the New York State Section meeting of the American Physical Society.

If you told me in 1985 that I would go into a line of work that involved a lot of public speaking, Iprobably would've said you were crazy. I've never exactly been quiet, but I wasn't incredibly outgoing as a kid. I was always happy to answer questions in class, but way less enthusiastic about standing up in front of a crowd of people and making a speech.

For that matter, if you'd told me in 1995 that I would be doing a lot of public speaking, I'm not sure what I would've said. My first talk at a big physics conference was that year, at QELS in Baltimore, and I was a nervous wreck. After the talk, one of the post-docs at NIST noted approvingly that I'd moved around a bunch while speaking, not just standing rooted in place. I explained that I'd been doing that because when I tried to stand still, I felt like my kneees were going to buckle. At the time, I might've agreed with those surveys where people say they fear public speaking more than death.

So, you know, it's kind of weird to realize that, twenty years later, I'm in a line of work where I will happily drive 300 miles for the express purpose of standing up in front of a crowd and giving a talk. But I've found that this is something I really enjoy. I like the process of laying out a talk that tells a good story, I enjoy making the slides, and most of all I've grown to really enjoy the feeling of standing up in front of a crowd and talking-- not just using the text I prepared, but ad-libbing stuff along the way. And, you know, sometimes a joke bombs, and I've gotten to where I can shake that off without getting too rattled, but when a line I thought of three seconds before I said it connects, it's a huge kick.

(This factors into my day job, too, because public speaking is a big part of teaching. My enjoyment of that is probably one of the factors that keeps me from going farther than I do with "active learning" stuff-- I understand the reasons PER folks try to get rid of lectures, but can't quite do it...)

But every now and then, I do get reminded that to a lot of people, the amount of public speaking I do is just about as weird as the math and physics... It's become one of my favorite parts of my job, though, and I'm always happy to do more of it.

(I may put up a more detailed post about the UCALL talk and what I said about Einstein, but today, I'm driving back across New York State to get home...)