{"id":3589,"date":"2011-04-14T22:37:31","date_gmt":"2011-04-14T22:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/?p=3589"},"modified":"2011-04-17T00:18:25","modified_gmt":"2011-04-17T00:18:25","slug":"the-end-of-formal-lectures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/the-end-of-formal-lectures\/","title":{"rendered":"The end of formal lectures"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I gave my last formal lectures of this school year!!! \u00a0Yay, for no more lecture-making late-nights for well, a few months! \u00a0Also 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<\/a> Hrefna. \u00a0We’ll have to wait and see if she turns up…<\/p>\n

The lectures themselves went ok-ish. \u00a0Well, at least I showed up. \u00a0I had two this morning, Electromagnetics (EM) at 8:20 am – 9:50 am, and Antennas from 10:00 am – 12:20 pm. \u00a0And I must say, that would indicate a lot of talking for a person with hardly any voice at all. \u00a0Tricky!<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0Thankfully 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. \u00a0 So I just walked right up to them and whisper-talked at them. \u00a0Good times.<\/p>\n

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). \u00a0After 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.<\/p>\n

As a result, I found myself trying to wax lyrically about\u00a0Electromagnetics\u00a0in general, trying to reinforce the fact that it is Really <\/em>Cool <\/em>Stuff!!! (Points to wireless microphone that isn’t working!)<\/em> “…It’s just been shrouded in lots of evil equations right now”. \u00a0And just to be nasty, I kept referring to ‘my’ current Electromagnetics book by Ulaby<\/a>, which is so much funner to read through than\u00a0their book, by Cheng<\/a>, which is just an\u00a0exercise\u00a0in obscurity.<\/p>\n

Yes, Cheng<\/a>. \u00a0My old arch-nemesis. \u00a0The book, that is. \u00a0That book lives in infamy in my head over the near-nervous-break-down I suffered while reading through it\u00a0(or attempting to)\u00a0to study for the final Electromagnetics exam back in the day. \u00a0 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. \u00a0So teaching it has been cathartic, because I’ve confirmed that it’s really a rather nasty textbook.<\/p>\n

(<rant>Here are some of the ways\u00a0the 9th chapter that I taught is bad: \u00a0a) 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!\u00a0<\/rant>)<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0I was basically screwed. \u00a0So 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. \u00a0I would control the mouse\/slides, and give small interjections when needed. \u00a0And you know what… it went pretty well I thought! \u00a0It was at least pretty fun\/funny, and my voice got spared.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0I 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.<\/p>\n

So all in all, not a terrible end, but probably not fanfare-worthy either. \u00a0Oh well. \u00a0There’s always next year… \ud83d\ude42 \u00a0(Finnur sighs….)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I gave my last formal lectures of this school year!!! \u00a0Yay, for no more lecture-making late-nights for well, a few months! \u00a0Also 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. \u00a0We’ll have to wait andRead 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-3589","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\/3589","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=3589"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3591,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3589\/revisions\/3591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}