{"id":3566,"date":"2011-04-07T21:38:54","date_gmt":"2011-04-07T21:38:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/?p=3566"},"modified":"2011-04-07T22:11:21","modified_gmt":"2011-04-07T22:11:21","slug":"three-more-lectures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/three-more-lectures\/","title":{"rendered":"Three&#8230; more &#8230; lectures&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m so conflicted about my job. \u00a0On one hand, I enjoy being in the classroom. \u00a0Sure, I often get second thoughts on how I should have talked about this thing or that, but generally I like babbling on and on, and I have learnt (and hopefully taught) some neat things this year. \u00a0On the other hand, making lectures is hard. \u00a0It&#8217;s mentally hard, and it takes a lot of time. \u00a0It&#8217;s hard to quickly read up on something, understand it, and distill it into a form that you can a) talk about, b) attempt to impart on others, in a manner that is c) interesting.<\/p>\n<p>So here I am, sitting on the sofa, not making tomorrow&#8217;s lecture. \u00a0Ok, that&#8217;s not entirely true. \u00a0I&#8217;m thinking about it and what it should contain &#8211; but I&#8217;m not actively working on it. \u00a0It may be because I&#8217;m tired (yup, could easily sleep for a couple of days) but it&#8217;s also because I&#8217;ve switched books for the very end of the course (the &#8220;Wave Propagation&#8221; part), and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Antennas-Propagation-Wireless-Communication-Systems\/dp\/0470848790\/\">the new book<\/a> isn&#8217;t stellar.<\/p>\n<p>Sure, the book&#8217;s got some good points, but the book reads like it grew out of somebody&#8217;s Ph.D. thesis &#8211; the intro touches on a lot of subjects, but it&#8217;s all surface. \u00a0Which is fine for me right now, I don&#8217;t have any time to go deep, but it means that I have to cut and paste what I want to say, and that takes a little more mental energy than just going sequentially along with a &#8216;proper&#8217; textbook.<\/p>\n<p>Thankfully, I only have <em>three&#8230; more&#8230; lectures<\/em> to write (2 x Antennas, 1 x EM) instead of five because, in my infinite wisdom, I hadn&#8217;t realized that no new stuff should be introduced during the last week. \u00a0That means that the coming Monday and Tuesday are the last &#8216;new stuff&#8217; days, and Thursday will just be a &#8220;come here all ye students and gather &#8217;round and let us discuss what the heck just happened this semester&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>My finals will be on 28 April and 10 May, and then there will most likely be &#8220;sick-make-up-exams&#8221; later in May and later this summer there will be &#8220;failed-make-up-exams&#8221;. \u00a0So it&#8217;ll be a while until I&#8217;m Done Done, but at least the constant drumroll of impending lectures will diminish.<\/p>\n<p>I look forward to sitting down in front of Matlab, and just coding. \u00a0For me.<\/p>\n<p>Research. \u00a0Who knew I&#8217;d miss you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m so conflicted about my job. \u00a0On one hand, I enjoy being in the classroom. \u00a0Sure, I often get second thoughts on how I should have talked about this thing or that, but generally I like babbling on and on, and I have learnt (and hopefully taught) some neat things this year. \u00a0On the other<a class=\"button\" href=\"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/three-more-lectures\/\" title=\"Read More\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-container col-md-12"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3566"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3569,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3566\/revisions\/3569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}