In the Dark

I saw this doing the rounds on Twitter the other day. I even made a little joke about it which went viral (by my standards) with over a million views and almost 2000 retweets:

There’s no accounting for taste.

Am I a meme now?

Anyway, I’m in the office quite early this morning ahead of my 9am Computational Physics lecture so thought I’d do a quick post. I realize that 9am is not early compared to practice in some institutions abroad where lectures can start at 7.30am or even earlier. Everything I say here is based on my own experience and is not claimed to be universal.

As a lecturer I don’t mind 9am lectures at all. I find itt’s nice to get something significant done before 10am as opposed to just trying to deal with emails. On the other hand, I live only about 20 minutes’ walk away from campus so I don’t have to get up especially early. As a matter of fact I get up at 7am on weekdays, so no real adjustment is necessary for a 9am start. If I had a two-hour commute it would no doubt be a different matter.

At conferences and so on, I don’t find myself sleeping in the morning sessions. I find the slots immediately after lunch the worst for staying awake. That’s the time we have our theoretical physics seminars at Maynooth, actually.

My own experiences of being an undergraduate student (at Cambridge) was that I had regular 9am lectures 6 days a week (Saturdays included) and didn’t mind those either. But Cambridge is relatively compact and, living in College, it didn’t take me long to get to the lecture theatres in town. I usually felt quite sharp at 9am, actually, probably less so later in the morning.

Of course the reality is different for many students, some of whom have lengthy journeys into campus on not-entirely reliable public transport, so find a 9am start a challenge (to say the least). It’s certainly not unknown for students to doze off, but I don’t mind that as long as they don’t snore too loudly. I try to break up these lectures with things for the students to do, and that sometimes wakes them up again. In terms of attendance it’s the early evening slots that are worse in my experience than early morning.

Anyway, here in Maynooth we teaching staff have no real say over timetabling so now I should head off to Hall C to set up.

UPDATE: I had a pretty full class but one student did doze (without snoring) for about 3 minutes.

This entry was posted on February 23, 2023 at 8:35 am and is filed under Biographical, Education, Maynooth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.