Earlier today, I had a guest lecture for my legal studies field work course that is highest on the scale of “could have gone disastrous.”

Our guest lecturer works closely with matters regarding the death penalty. The topic itself is great – there have been so much research done on the death penalty, there are so many opinions that exist about the death penalty, and there are so many personal stories one could have regarding working with people on death row, that the lecture can’t go wrong just from the topic itself.

Where it does go wrong, however, is the length of the presentation.

My lecture period is 75 minutes long. Today, we started about five minutes late due to random prep­a­ra­tion issues and technical difficulties, and spent about ten minutes going over some announce­ments, other class materials, and introducing the guest speaker.

It was finally time for the guest lecturer to begin her presentation.

Ten minutes later it was over. She asked if we had any questions.

Yes, she left 50 minutes at the end to answer our questions.

Now, it’s great that she cares so much about our input that she leaves five times as much time for questions than her presentation. But if she was faced with a silent class (which, fortunately for her, she wasn’t), that would’ve been pretty disastrous.