A leather jacket with tweed patches on the elbows

I just taught my first philosophy class today. As mentioned before, I'm taking two discussion sections for Lisa Lloyd's "Evolution, Religion and Society". The undergrads are slightly more formal here so I made a point of referring to the lecturer as "Professor Lloyd", even though I always address her by her first name. That already had me feeling quite the school-teacher when I returned to my computer to find an email addressed to "Mr. Best"! Ah, freshmen, they look at me and see a grown-up. Scary!

I think both sessions went pretty well. Unfortunately there's about 30 students in each class, quite an unwieldy number for a discussion class, so they discuss things in small groups and then relate to to rest of the class their answers. All I need to do is elaborate on those and explain the subtleties like the differences between theories, hypotheses and facts. We've been given a large list of study questions related to the readings, which I used to guide the discussion. There are more questions than we can get through but that just means we concentrate on the good ones. They seemed relatively well-engaged with the material, so I think it's going to get better as the semester moves on.