Well, today was my “Seminar for Excellence in Teaching” for this semester. The last couple semesters I’ve given talks on neuroscience and learning, but this semester I put together a presentation on learning disabilities in higher education, which was really, really interesting, but also a lot of work, as it’s significantly outside my area of expertise.

So I went about researching this topic pretty heavily the last month or so, and spent a lot of time putting together a presentation that I thought really got at the aspects of LDs that grad students and faculty would be interested in, and I was getting excited to give the presentation and interact and get feedback and all of that…and then two people showed up. There were 13 registered and two showed up.

Now, the two people that showed up were lovely people and engaged and discussed as we went through the presentation, but it was just one of those times that it felt like such a let-down to have worked so hard for what ended up being a fairly inconsequential event. Granted, I’ll most likely be giving this seminar again, so I guess I could think of it as something like a dry-run, but honestly, I’m disappointed. I don’t know if people forgot or just didn’t care to begin with – and it probably doesn’t help that I’ve been having serious attendance issues in the reading group I tried to start this semester too. I just feel like I haven’t had a “win” in a while now. Maybe that’s just what the end of the semester feels like.

Oh well. On the plus side, at least I got all the leftover pizza.