115 batshit stupid things you can put on the internet in as fast as I can go by Dan Tentler

Not sure if it'll help, since I don't have any teaching experience, but coming at this from the perspective of a student, thinking of what your students might be thinking given what they're saying: First, "not dry" doesn't necessarily mean "not prepared" or "spontaneous". Consider things like the SR-71 story [1] or the unprotected VNC endpoints presentation [2]. Second, keep in mind what you can give students that they can't get from a textbook or another lecture that they find on youtube. The best professors I had weren't the ones that could quote the textbook; the best professors I had were the ones that could provide context for the textbook, or tell stories that illustrated important edge cases or institutional knowledge that isn't written in any textbook. There's a huge amount of wisdom that could never be "professional" enough to make it into a textbook but is nevertheless fantastic for helping a student understand or remember the material. For example, consider the "Things I Won't Work With" series; would never get past a textbook review committee, but absolutely riveting on top of the information transfer. Third, and finally, how these relate to helping students absorb knowledge. Consider spaced repetition and the method of loci [4] and what they mean about how the human brain forms knowledge: People remember networks of knowledge, not single facts. That's why I cite war stories above - giving students a story to wrap around an idea lets them link to it from multiple