"The weakness is undoubtedly what is not taught, there needs to be more didactic teaching.... the odd extra lecture here and there or more plenary sessions, more organised tutorials and teaching in HARC".
And yes, it was a little odd to be lectured about the transformative power of democracy — by a Mauritanian".
It seemed odd to be lectured on safety by a group of pony-tailed road veterans who looked as though they might slice in and out of motorway traffic for fun.
I did not, as a young bacchant in the '60s and '70s, absent myself from the garden of herbal and pharmacological delights — far from it — so I found myself in an odd position, that is, lecturing a parent about drugs.
Hosts like Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers are unabashedly political; in a post-Stewart world, they long ago dropped the idea that there was anything odd about a comedian lecturing the nation.
There is also an odd moment in which Gloria lectures Robert about how great America is because women are in charge, as though Robert were not American.
Allusions, metaphors, jargon, jokes — anything that might appeal to an audience of coastal Californians but leave online viewers in Lebanon baffled — are often flagged and cut, a process that can bleach lectures to an odd cultural beige.
At Stanford, where the magnetism of Silicon Valley has helped draw a quarter of undergraduates to the engineering school, it's not unknown for a humanities course to have five students or fewer; a course with as few as 20-odd students is termed a "lecture".
