Teaching

Before I started working at Corporation of Current Employment, I agreed to do some teaching. They call it a half module (or something similar) which means that I have to do one 1.5 hour session per week for 10 weeks.

The students, on paper at least, are horribly high calibre. Several have written books on various subjects, one was a professor of economics in Brazil, several have degrees and graduate degrees in real sciences - like physics.

So I was slightly concerned about what I might know, and be able to tell them, that they didn't know. Well, except for jokes - obviously I'd know a lot of jokes that they didn't.

Anyway, it went surprisingly OK. I've always taught psychology students, or subjects reasonably closely related to psychology. Some things that psychology students seem to just know, these students struggled with. Other things they found very straightforward.

Their task, in the second week, was to construct a questionnaire to measure something that they were interested in, pilot it on each other, and then give it to as many people as they could. My favorite was a questionnaire that one group designed on relationship satisfaction. They decided that there should be three kinds of questions, one group should be 'satisfaction with sex life'. They came up with three items:

1. Are you satisfied with the frequency of your sex?
2. Are you satisfied with the quality of your sex?
3. Are you satisfied with the kinkiness of your sex?