For fifteen years, I have resisted the siren call of the written lecture. Not out of laziness or disdain for preparation, but out of principle: from the moment I first stood in front of a classroom clutching a remote for a PowerPoint presentation, I always believed that the alchemy of a good lecture was not in the script, but in the delivery. I honed my craft during my PhD years, taking perhaps one too many public speaking workshop and eventually teaching some myself. It became clear to me that the essence of teaching was not in reading from a page, but in the living act of storytelling. Slides became my scaffolding, more detailed when the subject matter was unfamiliar, sparser and more evocative when it was well within my wheelhouse. The classroom became a sort of a stage, and at times I acted as equal parts scholar and raconteur (whether I was any good at the latter should be a question for my former students).
This approach has served me well: over the years, I have relished the elasticity of this method - the freedom to jump over a new topic when a student’s question opened up a new avenue of exploration, the fun of improvising an analogy that would resonate with that specific cohort, the joy of knowing that the story I was telling was not just informative but, to an extent, alive. To script my lectures always seemed to me to risk suffocating the very thing that made them vital (and worth waking up early for the 20 year old that had the misfortune of meeting me at 9 am on a Monday). There is a certain romanticism, I admit, in standing before a room of students armed only with the architecture of a slide deck and the full weight of one’s preparation and imagination. It is teaching as a performance, yes, but also as an act of discovery - for the students and often, to be fair, for myself too.
Now, however, I am contemplating a change. I will be teaching a new course come January, one that ventures into territory less familiar to me, although no less compelling. For the first time, I am considering writing my lectures in full, committing my thoughts to paper in advance of their delivery. This is a shift that feels at once pragmatic and oddly disquieting. Writing could bring clarity and give me a chance to refine and structure my ideas in a way that speaking off the cuff might not. The subject matter of this course excites me, so much so that I have already been writing a few articles on its themes. The thought of extending this engagement into the lecture itself is tempting - and yet, I hesitate. What would be gained, and at what cost? There is a spontaneity to the thought-on-my-feet lecture that I fear might be lost in the act of scripting. The classroom, for me, has always been a space of intellectual dynamism, where ideas evolve in real time, shaped by the interaction of teacher, students, and the occasional tangent that proves unexpectedly illuminating (and this in spite of my well documented aversion for the traditional lecture). Writing my lectures feels, in some ways, like placing a pane of glass between myself and that experience. Would I still have the flexibility to deviate from the script, or would I feel bound by the words I had so carefully composed? Would the lecture lose its sense of immediacy and its capacity to surprise?
There is also, I must confess, a certain vanity in my reluctance. I like the idea of the lecture as a living thing, a creature of breath and voice rather than ink and page. There is a romanticism, perhaps even a touch of arrogance, in believing that the best teaching happens in the moment, without a script. I wonder if my resistance to writing is itself a kind of safety net, a refusal to confront the vulnerability of committing to the written word. What I find most striking, as I keep wrestling with this decision, is how it has forced me to confront the very nature of my identity as a teacher. For fifteen years, I have defined myself in part by the way I teach: fluidly, conversationally, the slides as a loose scaffolding to the delivery. To consider a different approach feels almost like questioning a part of my academic persona. On the other hand teaching, like scholarship, evolves with its challenges, its subjects, every new cohort of students. Perhaps writing my lectures is not an abandonment of my principles, but an evolution of them?
I do not know, yet, what I will do. Perhaps I will write my lectures and discover that they free rather than constrain, that the act of writing sharpens my thoughts without dulling my delivery. Or maybe I will keep to the familiar. What I do know is that this decision, small though it may seem in the grand scheme of a career, has reminded me of what I love most about teaching: its unpredictability and its endless capacity for reinvention. And perhaps that, more than any lecture I could write or deliver, is the real lesson?