The end of formal lectures

Today I gave my last formal lectures of this school year!!!  Yay, for no more lecture-making late-nights for well, a few months!  Also yay for a less grumpy Hrefna, and hopefully a more well rested, well balanced, less frantic, less panicked, more serene, less manic, more energetic, more knows-where-her-towel-is Hrefna.  We’ll have to wait and see if she turns up…

The lectures themselves went ok-ish.  Well, at least I showed up.  I had two this morning, Electromagnetics (EM) at 8:20 am – 9:50 am, and Antennas from 10:00 am – 12:20 pm.  And I must say, that would indicate a lot of talking for a person with hardly any voice at all.  Tricky!

To sort things out with regards to me having hardly any speaking voice at all, I got the building manager to show me how the ‘sound system’ in the first auditorium works, but as luck would have it, it kept cutting out on me.  Thankfully it wasn’t a ‘lecture’ per say, but a ‘come ask questions if you have them’-kind of a thing and only a few souls showed up.   So I just walked right up to them and whisper-talked at them.  Good times.

Of course, it turned out they didn’t really have any really concrete questions, they were more curious to hear what other people were thinking of asking about, and whether I would be dropping hints about the final (hadn’t written it so, no).  After we’d sussed this out, and I’d set them the task of looking through the book to find questions, one student started asking questions from the part of the course that I hadn’t taught.

As a result, I found myself trying to wax lyrically about Electromagnetics in general, trying to reinforce the fact that it is Really Cool Stuff!!! (Points to wireless microphone that isn’t working!) “…It’s just been shrouded in lots of evil equations right now”.  And just to be nasty, I kept referring to ‘my’ current Electromagnetics book by Ulaby, which is so much funner to read through than their book, by Cheng, which is just an exercise in obscurity.

Yes, Cheng.  My old arch-nemesis.  The book, that is.  That book lives in infamy in my head over the near-nervous-break-down I suffered while reading through it (or attempting to) to study for the final Electromagnetics exam back in the day.   Yes, that whole experience is probably directly linked to a ‘wrong time of the month’-issue, but none-the-less, I’m still scarred by that book, and I blame it for inducing in me a totally unfounded level of anxiety about the subject.  So teaching it has been cathartic, because I’ve confirmed that it’s really a rather nasty textbook.

(<rant>Here are some of the ways the 9th chapter that I taught is bad:  a) There is no summary for anything or a reason given for learning any of it except a paragraph in the beginning, b) The only picture of transmissions lines in the whole chapter doesn’t have markings to show what dimensions the equations, that appear many pages later, refer to, c) The chapter jumps from steady state, to transients to steady state, without warning or even a heads-up, d) Important equations are revealed in examples! </rant>)

Ok, so having waved good-bye to the 2nd years students, it was time to face the 3rd year students, and ‘give’ the final lecture in the third year room, that has no sound-system.  I was basically screwed.  So I went to the bakery, bought some small cookies, showed up in class, and informed the 5 or so students in attendance that they would be ‘performing’ the lecture two slides per student.  I would control the mouse/slides, and give small interjections when needed.  And you know what… it went pretty well I thought!  It was at least pretty fun/funny, and my voice got spared.

Then I showed them a document with all the things they’d written that they thought they would/wanted to learn in this course, and it wasn’t that far off.  I also took them through the formal course description and we weren’t all that far off with that one either, even though it was written a long time ago by another teacher.

So all in all, not a terrible end, but probably not fanfare-worthy either.  Oh well.  There’s always next year… 🙂  (Finnur sighs….)