Nick Mount’s first-year English class has a playlist, and his students can make requests through his website. “What’s weird is that they ask for all this stuff from the 70s, and I’m like ‘Have you heard of this new band?'”
Mount is the affable teacher of the popular first-year English course “Literature for Our Time.” The class is so huge it fills both levels of the Isabel Bader Theatre, but he isn’t daunted by the size of his audience.
For Mount, a finalist in TVO’s best lecturer competition, lecturing is a labour of love.
“Lecturing is what I came here to do,” he said. “Sure, I have bad days, bad classes, but I love what I do. You have to.”
It also helps that he understands how difficult it can be for students to listen to profs talk for hours on end. “I myself find it hard to pay attention to most lectures or scholarly papers for longer than about fifteen minutes,” he said, “so I’m acutely aware of drifting attention spans.”
During breaks, Mount, a barroom DJ in the 80s, keeps students interested by playing pop songs inspired by some of the works they read for class.
According to Mount, the secret to good lecturing isn’t flashy visual aids or entertaining jokes-although they do come in handy-but simply hard work.
“I spend what’s probably a ridiculous amount of time thinking aboutlectures,” he said, “their structure, their content, how to convey difficult ideas in the clearest and most engaging way possible.”
While the winning prof in TVO’s Great Lecturer competition only gets bragging rights, the winner’s university gets a $10,000 scholarship from TVO.
“Given that the only other prize I’ve won in my life was a string artproject at a school raffle when I was 12, [I feel] pretty damn good. I am grateful and honored that students
would take the time to nominate me,” Mount said.
Mount’s lecture airs 4 p.m. this Sat. and Sun. on TVO. Viewers can then vote online for that week’s contestants, at www.tvo.org
