The shaking here in Hamilton is hardly on the scale of Seddon and Wellington, but it does mean my students aren’t going to get anything meaningful out of their measurement of the gravitational constant this afternoon. The Cavendish experiment uses a sensitive torsional pendulum, whose motion is currently more dominated by ground movement than by […]
Continue readingTag: teaching
Version control
I’ve commented before that there are a lot of skills that our science graduates need to have, that don’t get explicitly taught at university. That’s because they don’t neatly fit into compartmentalized degree courses where the structure is dictated by technical knowledge. So things such as how to give a half-decent presentation, how to keep […]
Continue readingAll classes are different
I’m sure many people have had a conversation with a school-teacher friend that goes along these lines: You: "How are you today" Teacher: "Uh. I’m in a bad mood. I’ve just had class 8C. Why do they have to be so difficult?" You: "Is that just normal of year eights?" Teacher: "No. Last year’s lot […]
Continue readingMy equipment doesn’t work…
We’re three weeks into our ‘B’ semester here. One of the papers I’m teaching (just on the fringes of) is our main first year physics paper. When I say ‘on the fringes of’, it means I’m supervising one laboratory session a week. It’s good to keep in contact with what’s going on at first year […]
Continue readingA stonking good start to our experimental physics paper. Not.
Just a couple of hours ago, I was thinking that I really need to do another blog entry for the week, but (a) can’t think what to do it on and (b) don’t have time to do it because I have a lab class for the afternoon. Well, the events in the lab class have […]
Continue readingWoolly writing is a symptom of woolly thinking
People who think well, write well. Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches. David Ogilvy. There’s nothing like reading through and marking students’ exam scripts. Mostly it is terribly boring, but sometimes it is enlightening. One of the questions I asked on an exam this semester involved getting the students to […]
Continue readingUnits – they just don’t go away
One thing that’s become really clear to me in teaching physics is that dimensions and units are not straightforward concepts for students. I might hazard the assertion that they are ‘threshold concepts‘ – ones where grasping what they are about transforms you way of thinking. Most people at least half-understand the idea of units – […]
Continue readingYou know you are having a bad day when…
This morning I turned up to give my solid state physics lecture and I realised I was in the wrong place. I’d gone to the lecture room where the Friday lecture is held, not the Thursday one. The trouble is, I had absolutely no recollection of where the Thursday lecture was. Not being a smart-phone […]
Continue readingWatch the students
This week I sat in on a lecture given by a junior colleague of mine. Partly this was so I could offer him some guidance, but partly so I could see how someone else approaches the the teaching of physics and engineering material. It was enlightening experience for me. One thing I did was to […]
Continue readingIt’s what the learner knows…
On the door of her office, Alison Campbell has a sign that says "the biggest factor in learning is what the learner already knows". Or something like that. In other words, students build upon an existing foundation when they make sense of the world. This can be very helpful, or very unhelpful, depending on whether […]
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