What Not To Do In A Lecture
Some of you are coming to university for the first time in September and may have some questions of how to act in various new scenarios that you will be experiencing. Fortunately for you, the satire section has you covered and will be providing some tips to help you manage the scary business that is university life.
The first of these will be a lecture, as it is likely that you will never have been in one before and will be wondering how you are expected to act as you sit with your course mates in one large lecture theatre. Lectures will also be one of the first things that you encounter at university, as fresher’s week will provide multiple introductory lectures that are designed to help you get your bearings. But there is no need to fear, here is a comprehensive list of what not to do in a lecture.
1. Don’t turn up sober- This may sound counter-intuitive, but this will be a key part of your first year at university. Many people will probably tell you that lectures are key to your comprehension of your course and this is probably accurate as it is when you are told the content of each module. However, if you aren’t hungover (or preferably still drunk from the night before) then this may end in you taking too much information from a lecture and be hated by your peers in seminars (which we will cover soon) for actually answering questions. The discomfort and disorientation caused by not being sober will make your notes suitable for filling the twenty-minute silence in between a seminar leader asking a question and somebody actually answering it following a thorough look through your incoherent notes.
2. Bring the loudest laptop you can find- What do students like more than being talked at for an hour? Being talked at for an hour accompanied by a symphony of typing as people beat their keyboards with mallets. The sound of people attacking their Microsoft Word documents as they copy down the PowerPoint slides from the projector, rather than merely finding the slides on Moodle, is the key part of a lecture. Frankly, if you aren’t doing this then I find it unlikely that you will be able to learn anything at all. If you are worried that the noise omitted by your laptop will not be sufficient, then I recommend adding a MacBook to your list of things to buy before university, they tend to be the loudest.
3. Be sure to answer any questions that the lecturer asks- The only thing possibly better than having the loudest computer in the lecture theatre is being the one that answers all the questions that a lecturer may ask. Many lecturers have the delightful habit of asking a room full of hungover (as long as you followed step one) young adults questions, rather than just telling them what they need to know. It is imperative that you answer any question posed to the room, however confident you are that you know the answer. There is no better way to make friends than by shouting out during the lecture and rewarding the behaviour of the lecturer.
4. Write everything on the screen- When taking notes in the lecture, there is little point in really listening to the lecturer, you should be concentrating on writing the words on the board verbatim. What the lecturer is actually saying is irrelevant and for all you care they could be explaining why the moon landings were fake and the earth is flat. The slides are the key parts of the lecture, why else would they be there and be the parts they chose to write down?
You are now prepared to enter a lecture with confidence that you will be ready for anything that they throw at you, without fear of completely embarrassing yourself!
Views expressed in InQuire's satire articles are those only of the writer and InQuire does not endorse any of these opinions, this section is dedicated to entertainment purposes only. We use fictitious characters in our stories, except in regards to public figures being satirised directly.
