Busy four weeks ahead

It’s past mid-March which for me means one thing: I’ve begun teaching “Electromagnetics” (“EM”) in addition to “Antennas and Wave Propagation“.

Yes, that means four (2×40 min) new lectures a week instead of just (a manageable) two for the next four weeks, a.k.a. going to bed very late for four nights a week for a month, because I’m physically and mentally unable to get my lecture-making-act together any more than that. Also… my memory is shot so I don’t really remember stuff in detail for more than a day. Which makes for repeat embarrassments every time I don’t manage to finish a lecture and have to pick up the thread a few days later. Uhhh… why did I write that particular detail in my notes again?

I did manage to plan slightly ahead at the beginning of the semester, and for the first couple of double-duty-weeks (this past week and the next) one of the Antenna lectures will be covered by students giving their own talks on a research topic of their own choosing.  The first such session was yesterday, and it went really well.  Color me happy! 🙂

Another happy Antenna moment was in ‘lab’ this afternoon, when one group of students very carefully cut a couple of mm wide by 15 cm slit into the bottom of a large aluminium baking tray, and got it to radiate!  Yup, an antenna out of a dirt cheap super-market-bought tray.  I thought that was cool! 🙂

Thankfully, the EM class is the ‘fun part’ of EM, i.e. transmission line modeling (R, L, G, C etc), propagation of waves on the lines, reflections due to mismatched loads, and erm, the Smith Chart, and impedance matching.  (Oh, Wikipedia, I <3 U!)

I turn out to be my own worst enemy though because initially I was just going to use the old slides that were handed to me, but on closer inspection they turned out not to suit me at all (Come on!  The same non-descriptive slide headings for 10 slides in a row that have virtually nothing but equations on them??!  Even I got lost as to what the heck was going on!).  So now I’m making my own EM slides and I just hope that I’ll manage to cover all the material, because I suspect I’m going a wee bit slower than I would be if I were just reading the slides out loud.  Oh well…

So anyway, if I’m quiet, it’s because I’m mentally under a wooly blanket for the next four weeks, trying to blissfully ignore that I’m hosed.