As a (tenured) academic myself, I fully understand the flexibility (and the lack thereof). A staff of 50-100 sounds like a true nightmare. I've experienced classes of ~500 students myself, but 2000 seems quite excessive.
Congratulations for trying out lecturing and for the eloquent writeup.
P.S. Btw, I've stumbled upon your website https://www.recursionvisualizer.com/, which even works with memoized functions (in what seems to be a left-to-right call-by-value order), so I will be using this the next time I'm teaching dynamic programming or backtracking, in order to save time on drawing calls by hand on the board.
Congratulations for trying out lecturing and for the eloquent writeup.
P.S. Btw, I've stumbled upon your website https://www.recursionvisualizer.com/, which even works with memoized functions (in what seems to be a left-to-right call-by-value order), so I will be using this the next time I'm teaching dynamic programming or backtracking, in order to save time on drawing calls by hand on the board.