Thursday, May 01, 2008

New strategy for seminar speakers

Here's one I hadn't seen before until today.

I have often seen seminar speakers say that they encourage everyone to interrupt them during the talk with questions, etc. Today, however, one speaker (who is local and who knows me) good-naturedly started a talk with an alternative version of this statement that everybody except for me was encouraged to interrupt him with questions, etc. Everybody in the audience who knew me was naturally extremely amused by this. The moratorium was later lifted in the middle of the talk (at an appropriate point in which he discussed stuff I know pretty well), at which point I felt obligated to make some useful comment.

Oh, and the official reason that I was not allowed to ask questions was that there was apparently a risk that I wouldn't stop talking if I started.

In any event, this is one way to preempt potential bad behavior on my part. I'm also pretty sure I'm not going to be allowed to forget this...

2 comments:

Lemming said...

I feel like I'm not supposed to laugh this hard at work.

Mason said...

And today I told a student to get off of my lawn, so I'm apparently well on my way to becoming a well-trodden, eccentric, ornery mathematician. :)

I also have a speaker some grief in a short "workshop" this morning, although in this format there is supposed to be a ton of audience participation from the start (including from me, at least for now).