After several years of teaching, I’ve reached a consensus: the real time thief in lesson prep is never the lecturing itself—it’s finding materials. This post walks through my materials-preparation workflow step by step—each step marks where a tool takes over, so fellow teachers can use it for self-check.
Step 1: Take stock of what content is “outdated”
Two weeks before the course starts, the first thing to do is go through last semester’s slides and mark three types of content: data that is already outdated, cases students are no longer interested in, and new developments in the field. Textbooks always lag one beat behind the field; progress from the past year is the source of freshness in the classroom.
Step 2: Search the latest literature
Once the outdated content is clearly located, supplement material topic by topic. This step is the most time-consuming—searching each database one by one, filtering by year, downloading, reading abstracts, and judging whether something can go into class. Now this step is handed to muchsci: tell it “research progress on XX topic over the past year, summarized by subdirection,” and retrieval plus summarization are done in one go; I only need to pick from the results.
Step 3: Find discussable cases
Good cases are the soul of a class, but cases need to be new, relevant to students’ lives, and able to sustain discussion. My standard prompt: “Are there recent cases for concept XX that are suitable for classroom discussion?”—pick one or two handy ones from the returned case material pack; it’s much faster than rummaging across the whole web.
Step 4: Put materials into slides
Selected literature abstracts and cases—the last step is assembly. Organizing materials into PPT supplementary pages is also handed to the tool—tell muchsci “organize the selected materials into PPT supplementary pages,” and the produced pages can be inserted directly into the existing slides without reformatting.
A lesson-prep time ledger
Take a course with three class hours per week as an example: in the past, for each round of teaching, the materials step ate up about an entire weekend; now among the four steps, retrieval, summarization, and assembly are all taken over by tools, and what I’m responsible for is only “judging which materials are worth bringing into class”—which is exactly the part teachers cannot replace.
Update the materials once a year, and ten years later this course will still be alive. After muchsci takes over retrieval and summarization, the way I find materials for lesson prep has changed—and only then does the course keep its flavor.