Posts in category Education

though I still have a flu, I did not feel too bad in the morning. The first lecture at 8:45 is always a challenge for me but I think I could woke and came fresh and energetic. Well. Let me put it frankly: I expected more students. I started with four, and it came to eight or perhaps nine in 15 minutes. Still it’s rather dissapointing, though I understand the feeling is not rational: the statistics of student numbers has very little to do with statistical mechanics, and I ought to adhere the latter.

The advantage of smaller audience is the motivation for less formal lecture style. I spared some time to derivation of entropy of the ideal gas in the framework of thermodynamics. Sankore 3.1 was not and ideal medium but I managed to draw a bunch of symbols: though most of them came a way to sharp and over-lined resembling pseudo-Gothic fonts of Nazi newspapers. I did not hasten and did not want to catch up with the material: there is still a delay of approxiamtely a half of the lecture.

Guess the second half where we have discussed the math of probability theory was pretty boring (not for me, though, since I know how usefull will it be soon). Well, I will do everything to make the rest less boring 🙂

has taken place today. I was having a light flu. Surprisingly, it was rather helpful. I was giving the lecture slowly, frequently repeating myself, and was not afraid to (re)state obvious. The material, at least in the first half of the lecture, did give an opportunity for this: it fact, it was a repetition of scattering matrix stuff in a bit general framework of multi-terminal scattering. I think the audience liked the tempo, there was a feedback, questions, even a minor mistake corrected during the break.

After the break it got tougher. The material was more challenging. Yet it was sufficiently fascinating/familiar to keep the attention of the audience. I had to be concise in two places to keep up the time. Yet to summarize it was not a bad lecture, pretty much in equlibrium

A bit worried about next lecture that really has lots of new concepts and requires attention of audience and my diligence as well. Hope I’ll recuperate by this time.

has started with a thrill: I’ve entered the classroom and seen it full, three times more people than expected. It took me a while to recognize that most audience were our Ph.D. students rather than master students expected. Anyway, full classroom works inspring.

I got a bit excited and has spent too much time on the general introduction: almost the same mistake I did earlier on the same day when giving Advanced Statistical Mechanics. I’d love to have twenty more minutes for the second part of the tale where really fairy things have been happening. Could not afford to postpone the ending, so last slides, the most difficult ones, were shown as quickly as cards shown by a magician performing a distract-attention trick in a less adult audience. My next tale will be in March and it will also concern inverse scattering problem. Perhaps I should repeat the stuff by the time.

Yet I’ve heard that the students were not completely dissatisfied. However, they made it clear that they appreciate the problem-solving sessions that were not planned. Well, it could be that an enthousiastic phd student would be as kind as to help us with one. And we shall definitely think about this for the next year.

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

The semester is looming, and from the beginning of January I’m mostly busy with education. I have just updated Blackboard pages for all my courses: Advanced Statistical Mechanics, Fairy Tales of Theoretical Physics and Quantum Transport.

For those who does not know: Blackboard is a Web-based educational framework used at our University. It is not completely senseless: one can store all study material and interact with students in a rather convenient fashion. However, a rather irritating aspect is that its interface changes from year to year to become more complex and inconvenient to use. Sofware has its own evolution, even less contollable or rational than the evolution of biological systems.

As mentioned, Jeroen Danon and me are writting a book on Advanced Quantum Mechanics. We are expanding and elaborating exsisting lecture notes, making it more complete and interesting.

There was a lecture on magnets introducing many-body trial wave function and spontaneous symmetry breaking. Some time ago we got an idea to add magnons to this Chapter thereby introducing Goldstone boson idea, a bit of gauge techniques and random phase approximation. It looked like two-day job, but it took most of my working time for the last two weeks. This included refreshing master-level physics I happened to need, and analythical and numerical evaluation of magnon spectrum: something I always wanted to do but never dared to. 

Despite a huge time loss, I enjoyed the activity, perhaps even more than the "real" research.