First lecture advanced statistical mechanics
has started with a little surprise. At the moment, there is a relatively big number of students, like slightly below 50, that have registered at the Blackboard. This is a way bigger than a number estimated from previous years. Yet usually Blackboard provides rather accurate estimation of number of students present at the first lecture. Today it was not the case: guess I’ve started with 10 people, that’s grown to 15 in 15-20 minutes. I cannot say at the moment if the surprise is pleasant or unpleasant. It only looks like Blackboard communication would be difficult for this course.
The major problem I’ve encountered was time. I was a way too slow giving the introduction that consisted from general information, general motivation of the level and direction of the course, short outline of the lecture scheme and couple of stories about Statistical Mechanics. While I’ve been trying to impress, and spent quite a time preparing this part, I do not think it was especially sucsessful. At least the response of the audience didn’t show this. Next time I should restrict myself to a short technical introduction.
So the introduction took about a half of the time. Given this, I thought I’d better skip the rest: it looked hopeless. Nevertheless it went a bit better than expected. There was some interaction with the audience: we recalled the first and the second laws. I got through the half of the transparencies of the first lecture. With respect to the material, it’s more than 2/3 of its content.
This makes a schedule problem. I still want to compact all introduction to the course, that is, thermodynamics and basics of ASM, within three lectures. We’ll see if it’s possible
