SuppliedNormally known for making students laugh out loud, film studies lecturer Dalbir Sehmby thought someone was joking with him in saying he’d been nominated for delivering this year’s Last Lecture. The nomination was, in fact, genuine.
“It wasn’t even on my radar,” Sehmby said. “When I got the email, I first thought it was a joke and that someone was just messing with me.”
The Last Lecture, organized by the University of Alberta Alumni Association, gives professors a chance to break away from curriculum and address an audience as if it were their last chance to do so. The format was popularized by Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who delivered his Last Lecture after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.
As an instructor at CSJ, Sehmby injects his lessons with large doses of humor. When his English 113 class reconvened after the Easter holiday, which he called a “chocolate binge of three days,” Sehmby joked about Cadbury Mini Eggs throughout the class and how addicting they were even though they made him sick. Using humour connects students with course material, he said.
“Yeah, I can be a dork,” Sehmby said. “It annoys my wife but with those who have more minimal contact with me, like my students, it can make them laugh.”
Sehmby, a sessional lecturer in English at Campus Saint-Jean since 2008, was born and raised in the Northwest Territories, and moved to Edmonton with his family when he was around 12 years old. At the U of A, Sehmby studied film studies, comparative literature and psychology during his BA, MA and PhD. Sehmby then taught film studies at the U of A from 2000 to 2005 and then spent three years teaching English as a second language in Lithuania before returning to Edmonton in 2008.
Emerson Csorba, a former student of Sehmby’s who graduated in 2014, remembered Sehmby as a “super funny guy” from a first-year English class.
“There were a few occasions where I had to get up and leave the class because you’re laughing so hard that your stomach is in complete pain,” Csorba said.
Csorba also remembers the individualized feedback Sehmby gave students in personalized letters, a practice he developed when teaching film studies.
“I had a student who had trouble with writing an essay and I started to write comments, but then the comments started to get quite big,” Sehmby said. “Then I felt bad that I’m typing her letter and not anybody else so I started typing for the entire class.”
In teaching, Sehmby is motivated by seeing students develop into mature learners as the class progresses, especially in a first-year English class that students don’t want to take.
“In the beginning of the term, I’d ask (students) how many of you want to be here. Often people respond with, ‘I’m forced to be here,’” Sehmby said. “If you’re forced to be somewhere, you don’t like it automatically so there’s often that resistance. To see that switch when they start to see that this is valuable, it’s a good thing to see.”
Sehmby will deliver his last lecture, at the Timms Centre for the Arts on Thursday, April 7. He’s still brainstorming what he’d talk about, but he hopes to touch on his family and experiences with cultural clashes, while giving it his usual humorous spin.
