teaching
-
Training Scientists: What’s the Point?
My colleagues and I spend what is probably an inordinate amount of time complaining about the occasional lapses of the basic skills of our students, their inability to take notes, their obsession with marks and what’s going to be on the exams. Because, like everyone else, we like to complain. But pretty often I get…
-
O SOLE Mio
I just received the SOLE (Student On-Line Evaluation) results for my cosmology course. Overall, I was pleased: averaging between “good” and “very good” for “the structure and organisation of the lectures”, “the approachability of” and “the interest and enthusiasm generated by” the lecturer, as well as for “the support materials” (my lecture notes), although only…
-
Teaching Cosmology
I’ve just finished teaching my eleven-week winter-term Cosmology course at Imperial. Like all lecturing, it was exhilerating, and exhausting. And like usual, I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I think I understand the subject better than when I started out. (I hope that the students can say some of the same things. Comments from…
-
Exam nightmares
The students in my cosmology course had their exam last week. There’s no doubt that they found the course tough this year — it was my first time teaching it, and I departed pretty significantly from the previous syllabus. Classically, cosmology was the study of the overall “world model” — the few parameters that describe…
-
Teaching time
Just a quick apology for the lack of words appearing on the page here lately. In addition to planning for the upcoming launch of the Planck Satellite, I’ve been swamped with teaching my first-ever full-length undergraduate cosmology course. It’s lots of fun, but the biggest challenge is just systematizing this whole body of knowledge that…
-
No respect
·
I gave the last lecture in my Fourier class today. I think the course started alright, but I seemed to be losing the students for the last few lectures (not helped by the fact that three of the ten hours of the course were 5-6pm on Fridays, but a good workman doesn’t blame his tools…).…
-
Update
·
Too busy for much blogging for the next few weeks. In the meantime: First, my grad students: Goodbye to one just finishing, hello to my new one, congratulations to the one who just transferred to official PhD-student status, and, finally, to the one staying on as a postdoc! I’m excited that I’m able to still…
-
Summer Break
Well, Summer break is over, the days are surprisingly short already, the sky is rarely clear, and the students are back. Warm-weather highlights ranged from the intellectual pleasures of my visits to Portugal and Chicago, to the rather more visceral ones of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation at the Roundhouse, The Hold Steady at Shepherds Bush,…
-
Whew…
·
I’ve just finished my lectures for the course in Fourier Series and Fourier Transforms that I’ve been teaching. It was an intense, exhilarating and ultimately frustrating three-and-a-half week adventure –and I fear that it didn’t go very well. It’s tough material, probably the first stuff that these second-year students have seen in their undergraduate career…
-
Teaching Experiences: Fourier at Imperial
Today I started teaching my first real lecture course (as pointed out in the comments, the link is only accessible within the Imperal network). I am teaching the second-year physics students mathematical techniques of Fourier Series and Fourier Transforms — this is the theorem that you can represent any function as a sum of so-called…
Search
Recent Posts
Categories
- Academia (64)
- Art (57)
- Blog (1)
- Miscellanea (101)
- Music (71)
- Net (63)
- News (28)
- Politics (110)
- Science (332)
- Uncategorized (4)