Overview

A young [person] doesn't realize how much time it takes to prepare good lectures, for the first time, especially." ^[1]

Richard Feynman

After his work at Los Alamos during the war, Richard Feynman began teaching at Cornell. For a long time, he became depressed at how little research he was doing. He claimed to feel "tired" ^[2] and was unsure what was making him feel that way. Later, he realized how much time and energy preparing his class presentations required. Years later, because of the time that preparing a new lecture demands, Feynman hesitated to do the set of freshman physics lectures that ended up bringing him so much acclaim. As he predicted, the freshman lectures did consume his time, causing him to put aside his research. Although he spoke only twice a week, he "worked from eight to sixteen hours per day on these lectures, thinking through his own outline and planning how each lecture fit with the other parts." ^[3]

Preparing a strong presentation does takes time. Time is needed to understand the content well enough to organize it in a fashion that is readily comprehended by the audience. Time is also needed to gather the important images, to graph the important results, and to incorporate those images and graphs into a set of welldesigned slides. Moreover, time is needed to rehearse the material so that the speaker can find the right words to explain the difficult concepts and to smooth the transitions between points.