Posts in category Education

has taken place today. It was difficult material-wise. I am not satisfied with the way Kardar presents the transition between his particle book and his field book. In fact, I think that the aspects worth mentioned right at the transition are certaintly present in the book: but scattered in pieces over at least four chapters. So I wanted to proceed differently, and brought these pieces together. The lecture is supposed to consist of philosophical part, intermezzio of Ising model, and description of methods general for all the models.

Well, I have had a terrible time problem. It looked like a first lecture I ever prepared. The philosophical part was told in more or less normal tempo. Yet I have to speed up already at Ising model and begun to skip some details. As to the methods part, I could only do mean field: I’d need 15-20 minutes more to finish the part. Terrible. I’ve spent so much time to prepare the lecture, was anxious about the presentation so I worked till 2 a.m. today. The result was clearly below the expectations.

There must be a way to present the stuff the way planned. I swear that next year I’ll practice the lecture again with timer in hand. And will go to bed well before 2 a.m.

has taken place today. One of the most spectacular topics and one of the highest achievements of quantum transport so far: home-made quantum mechanics achieved by combining Josephson effect and Coulomb blockade.

It looks like a semester break was enough for deterioration of my professional qualities. Although the lecture has not that many slides and originally (five years ago) has been planned as 45 min lecture, I did not manage to organize time-line correctly: too much bubble-talking at first slides, way too fast presentation of the last slides. There were times I did this lecture better. However, I think there was a contact with the audience, so I’m marginally satisfied.

has taken place on Thurdsday. It was a beautiful bright morning, typical for beginning of spring. At the time of the beginning, there was a single student in the audience. He did not feel easy, looked like he would gladly be otherplace. I waited a bit, and we got a company, then yet more, so like in fifteen minutes number of students was back to normal. The phemonenon is known, the student activitity always reaches a deep minimun at the last lecture before the semester break. Especially if the weather is nice.

Apart from this, the lecture was satisfactory. Or, to put it more carefully, I expected a worser one since I have decided to make it close to the book and Kardar uses the topic of ideal quantum gas mainly to brush algebraic skills of students. He derives a single implicit formula and obtains all physical cases by tedious limit calculations.

Given this, I think we still could enjoy some physics this bright morning

has taken place yesterday. We made a detour from Columb blockade back to scattering theory to combine it with superconductivity. We have discussed Andreev reflection, Josephson current and their relation with normal-nanostructure scattering.

I’d say that so far it has been the most satisfying lecture. I mean satisfying for me, it is for students to judge if it was satisfactory. I was on time, could pose control questions and gather satisfactory response. The topic by itself is rather fascinating but still easy

Next lecture only comes in three weeks, after the semester break.

Today I got an “official” student’s feedback on my course Advanced Statistical Mechanics. It’s prepared by by response group of our student’s society VvTP.

There are three points:

• Students are positive about the lectures and like the books (good..)
• They like to make presentations and especially the feedback they get (very good, Alina!)
• They find the exercises of much higher level than the lectures (oops…) and would love easier homework(ok…)

Have to think hard about the last point, never thought about it in such a way. A solution is perhaps to make the lectures twice more difficult and give no homework… How would you like it?

has taken place today. Well, there could be more students. I have been preparing to the topic that introduces perturbation theory in the context of non-ideal gas for quite a while. This is why I’m dissatisfied with the result: I would not if less time was spent.

I have changed the system of slide preparation which is now Latex-based. I’ve shown to students some simulation programs from Open Source Physics: they seemed interested.Will try to make homework based on these programs.

took place on Wednesday. Perhaps I schould call it a moderate succsess . I did all slides despite the fact there were 31 of them. There was a contact with the audience. I have an impression that I was able to outline the essence of applications of circuit theory.

Yet I’ve discovered small mistakes in the slides and was rather confused with those. Some have appeared due to undesired font conversion in pdf files. Some obviously persisted in this slide set yet a year ago: funny I did not pay attention to those that time.

My current workflow of slide preparation makes it very difficult to correct these mistakes. I am planning to switch to Latex-based slides. This, however, requires the conversion of all sildes to another format: doable but time-consuming task.

has taken place today. Moderate number of students, contact with audience persists although not very intensive. Finally, I’m through the basics! Yet not satisfied because lectured too slowly, had to skip the slides, still cannot find good tempo. Must do something to boost the performance…

was not that terrible: of course I speak for myself, but it seems I am coming in terms with the course and the audience. The latter even responded my questions and reacted on stimuls: rewarding it is.

I am a lecture behind the original schedule but fell comfortable about this. Since I have not posted the schedule for the second half of the semester yet, I can trim it incorporating thechanges. Next year I shall change the schedule that appeared rather unrealistic.

used to be a difficult one for me since there is a plenty of various material some of which is very challenging to explain. I honestly warned students about this fact, and, strangely, this seemed to help. I did it much better than usual, and felt attention to the topic.

However, I could not present everything, there are several slides left. Well, perhaps this is for the better. The next lecture is devoted to more practical examples of the material of lecture #3, and the remaining slides will serve as a refreshing.

Actually, I’m writting this post in a week after the lecture: the schedule is overfilled again, and I made some travel. Have to catch up.