Posted in February 2011

The semester has begun for me. Today I gave the first lecture of quantum transport course.

As usual, the number of students roughly corresponded to Blackboard list and was about the same as during all these years. The intensity of feedback was also usual, that is, almost zero during the first lecture. Let’s hope this intensifies soon.

Some things were new. The sudents were of course new, while I think I could recognize three familiar faces. The room was quite new for me, it took me like 15 minutes to gasp where the cables go, how to shift the non-digital blackboard and where to stand. The latter still waits for better solution: today I felt cornered. Also, all these novelties confused me quite a bit.

However, the most important and also most confusing novelty is the presentation program. I’ve chosen one called Sankore 3.1. It’s made with love and has some nice features like screen magnification and pulling that are absent in more sophisticated and expensive presentation programs. Yet it’s a free software, so it works only if it fancies it, the manual is in French, but this is not what makes it unreadable. Naively, I expected the screen tools to be visible for me only, and that is what I manage to do on a test projector: alias, not on the projector available in the class. I have to write on screen, and this is in principle possible: yet it requires some more training of my motorics.

One thing was both good
and relatively new: I managed to finish the lecture on time not skipping a single slide. Since the first lecture is overloaded with new and rather unusual material, this is a positive surprise. This should deteriorate the quality of explanations. However, I cannot immediately see where it went especially bad. Can you help me here? I’d appreciate your comment.

Bad things evident for me mostly concern technical side of my speech. Since I was not given lectures for more than a year, some skills have dissapeared without me noticing. The tone, strength and clearness of my voice needed improvement, I had some language difficulties, jokes and other deviations from the lecture flow could be more motivated and to the point.

We’ll see how it will go.