Term has now finished, so teaching is all done for 2011. Phew. It was 11 weeks, and as always, sometimes it felt like a lifetime but at the same time it seems as if you blink in week 3 and then its suddenly week 8. But that is just my perspective. For the son of one of my colleagues it really was a lifetime as he was born on the 1st day of term. Handy for his father as he did not have to remember both his son’s age and the week of term, as they’re the same.

I think the teaching went OK; the student feedback was mostly positive. I do have to battle a bit with my handwriting as it does tend towards the illegible, and the students rightly commented on that. As my primary school teachers did. This is something I need to work on.

I enjoyed teaching my level three course on statistics and biological physics. In one lecture on probability theory in data analysis, I used as an example the probability of finding a tiger on campus. In the next lecture one of the students turned up dressed as a tiger. Clearly my lecturing had an impact. good to know. I perhaps should have invited him up to illustrate a point but I was rather startled so missed that opportunity – you don’t expect students turning up dressed as a tiger, so don’t plan for it.

Especially for maths I typically do chalk-and-talk lectures, and they can be fun. Particularly if it is a 9am lecture, I can mess up signs or stuff like that. Then either a student spots it and puts their hand up, or if I am little more awake I spot that several students are looking puzzled, and conclude that I should do a quick check. Either way is good, so long as the error is fixed it is all good learning. But I should probably have some sort of end-of-term prize for the student who spots the most errors.