When your teaching goes right - the response is immediate. Your students connect with you, with the content you're trying to explain, with how you've designed the session to help make the content understandable. You feel a reassurance that everything needed to make your lesson engaging, active, interesting, understandable has all come together and for most of the students the desired effect has been achieved. Even if you have one of these 'connected' session in every term or semester, it's enough to give you the inspiration and energy to deal with all the other times when your lessons pass by uneventfully. I had one of these 'connected' sessions last week and the effect on my psyche and confidence was just so uplifting. So many behind-the-scene aspects related to my work conditions have played havoc with my sense of purpose and confidence in my role as academic, that having this very positive and immediate feedback from my students was just what I needed last week. While I fear this description of events and its effect on me is now bordering on the cliche, this simple classroom engagement has release an overwhelming feeling of hope and possibility - that maybe I still have something worthwhile to offer, even if only to the unsuspecting 70 odd students who happen to have me as their Communications lecturer.
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