As I often do on a Sunday morning, I just sat down to look at my timetable for the forthcoming week. Until Friday 12th this is “Study Week” and my Outlook calendar is noticeably less cluttered than recently because teaching ended on Friday 5th May. Although I had a lecture and a tutorial on Friday morning I did find Campus was already much quieter than usual. Many students at Maynooth University rent rooms here for only part of the week and Fridays are generally quiet because some students leave on Thursday evening if they don’t have classes on Fridays, and I suppose some that do usually have Friday classes will have had them cancelled as the lecturer had finished the syllabus. My two classes on Friday were actually for revision, actually.
At any rate the cloisters of St Patrick’s House looked rather empty on Friday as I headed for a quick lunch in Pugin Hall before the final-year project presentations in the afternoon.
Incidentally, colleagues in other departments have reported a drastic decline in lecture attendance over the last few weeks. I can’t say I’ve noticed that myself but my classes are by no means statistically representative.
I will be doing two more revision classes next week, one for Advanced Electromagnetism and one for Computational Physics. don’t know how many will attend these but it’s the students’ last chance to ask me questions before the examinations, which are on Thursday 18th May and Saturday 20th May respectively. Friday 12th May marks the start of the Examination Period – for some reason this always starts on a Friday – during which many teaching rooms are unavailable so we don’t usually do revision classes beyond Study Week.
I won’t be teaching either of these modules next academic year. In fact I won’t be teaching anything next year, as I’ll be off on sabbatical. I’ll miss the teaching and am particularly sad that I won’t see the class in my 3rd year module again, unless some of them remain for Masters or PhD studies, as they will complete their studies next year while I am away. Since I am officially on leave from 1st September 2023, my final teaching-related responsibility for this year will be marking the repeat examinations in August.
In case anyone asks, I don’t know who’ll be delivering the modules I did this year, but the handover shouldn’t be too hard as there are complete sets of notes for all of them (and plenty of problem sets).
I don’t know which modules I’ll be giving when I return either, but I hope there’s an opportunity for a bit of a reshuffle. In particular, I’ve been doing Computational Physics for six years now and maybe it’s time for a fresh pair of hands on that one. It’s not that I dislike it at all – in fact I like it – but I think there are good arguments for a refresh every now and again. I’ve always taken the view that anyone employed in a physics department should be able to teach any subject up to the 3rd year so I don’t particularly mind what happens next. At any rate it would be nice to have a go at a few different things before I retire. Who knows, I might even get to teach some astrophysics or cosmology at some point?
It’s not just about undergraduate teaching, of course. Study Week or not I still have the regular meetings with my research students, a cosmology discussion group and a Euclid telecon. But my main objective between now and the arrival of my examination scripts to mark is to finish two manuscripts that are very late. I’ve no excuse for that other than poor time management by myself.
Looking further ahead, the launch of Euclid is scheduled for the first half of July and I hope to find time to organize some sort of public event related to this. I’m also attending the Euclid Consortium annual meeting in Copenhagen at the end of June. I’ve also been invited to contribute to the UK National Astronomy Meeting, which is in early July this year, in Cardiff…
In the Dark 