Want to hear about the ultimate teaching experience for an an earth-sciences professor? Listen to The Chronicle’s podcast with David D. Oglesby, in which he describes what happened when a real earthquake hit during his earthquake lecture at the University of California at Riverside last week.

Mr. Oglesby was giving a lecture about quakes to a group of community-college students who want to become science teachers. Then an actual tremor hit. “I yelled out loud to the rest of the people in the classroom, ‘Everybody under the tables!’” Mr. Oglesby said. When the shaking stopped, he said, the irony hit everyone. “We used this as an opportunity to talk about what you feel during an earthquake and why,” he said. “Obviously people were quite tuned in, and it was very successful pedagogically.”

Mr. Oglesby usually simulates quake sounds with a small machine during his talks. “But Mother Nature’s experiment was probably much more memorable than mine.” —Josh Fischman