The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
RSS feeds: v0.91; v1.0 (RDF); v2.0; Atom.
6:40pm on Tuesday, 22nd January, 2019:
Anecdote
It was the first CE217 lecture of the week today. It would have been last week, but we had a new concept introduced this year that cleared the decks for all Computer Science second-year students: Challenge Week. Some students even spent a week on it, although others only began work on the final day and as a result didn't perhaps do as well as they might.
Because of Challenge Week, instead of having 10 2-hour CE217 lectures, I have only 9. This means throwing content out and reordering everything. I quite like the idea of having less teaching to do, but if losing 2 hours of contact time means doing 6 hours of lecture-reorganising, in the end it's a loss for me.
That's not what caused the most disruption, through.
Sometime at the end of last year, one of the second-year students decided to change options and do CE217 instead of whatever they were doing instead. This meant the number of students taking the module went up to 87.
The largest room that the university has with tables that can be moved around in is 86. That one student meant I couldn't teach my game classes in the room for which they were timetabled.
I wanted the movable tables because then we can play and make games. That can't be done in rooms where the tables and chairs are tiered, like in a cinema. Nevertheless, the new room is exactly such a room.
It gets worse. I wanted my classes timetabled for 3 hours rather than 2 hours, because some of the activities I have lined up will take that long. The new room was only available for 2 hours. However, not to worry: I was allocated another room for the final hour, some distance away.
So ... we play games, then 2 hours in we pack everything away, walk to another room, and finish the game there? I think not.
Oh, and some of the students had a clash, so would be stopping after 2 hours anyway.
This has messed up my classes something rotten. It's not as if there ever will be 87 people present in the class anyway. There were 32 in the lecture this morning, with another 5 or so rolling up at various times after I'd started. That's fewer than half the students who should have been there. The timing — 9am — didn't help; many students think it's OK to ignore lectures at 9am, on the grounds that everyone else will. They may even have a point: if half the students fail their exams because they don't come to lectures, then that will be enough for the marks to be scaled so they don't fail. It's safety in numbers.
The students who did show up were actually quite a lively bunch, and actually answered questions when I asked them. I was somewhat taken aback, as this doesn't normally happen. Some of them asked questions, too — quite intelligent ones that pre-empt the content of later lectures. I was quite impressed. Unfortunately, apart from a visiting PhD student who's sitting in, none of them made the effort to be female. That's bad form.
The evening's CE317 lecture was the most boring of the whole module. At one point, four students were asleep at the same time. I don't blame them. I'd have been asleep too if I hadn't cricked my neck this morning; it kept me awake.
Only another two months and it's all over (except for the part where the entirety of Easter disappears in a mist of assignment grading).
Latest entries.
Archived entries.
About this blog.
Copyright © 2019 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).