How to Deliver a Riveting Lecture
As I write these lines, I am sitting through a long, exceedingly dry, and from my own perspective, mostly irrelevant, medical lecture. If this were a rare event, or one that only occurred when I was in the audience, there would be no reason to continue with this piece. In fact, just as I began to pen the end of the previous sentence, the chin belonging to the person seated next to me dropped precipitously to his chest.
There is much evidence (albeit anecdotal) to suggest that this process, oft repeated around the world, is one of the greatest wastes of time known to professional people.
One must first consider the origin and history of "the lecture", to fully comprehend how such a profligate dissipation of professional person-hours has been allowed. Before Herr Guthenberg's timely invention, books were both exceedingly rare and restrictively expensive; as a result, they were not available to the majority of the populace, which in any case, was mostly illiterate.
In medieval universities, the art of teaching involved a professor reading aloud to his students from the one available book. (Thus the word lecture: through Middle English, via Middle French, originating from Latin: lectura, from lectus [past participle of legere: to gather, select, read.])
Books, and the knowledge that lies therein, have always represented power.
