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End of Term Blog

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , on December 18, 2021 by telescoper

Yesterday was the last day of teaching at Maynooth University for 2021 and, although I didn’t have any teaching to do, I walked to the Department partly to get a bit of fresh air having been stuck at home on Thursday after my booster jab, and partly to collect a few things before the break. I also discovered that a lovely parcel of goodies had been sent to me and I was anxious to collect the items before Christmas.

I’ll be keeping myself to myself over the break, apart from the odd trip to the shops, and am glad to be doing so. We are yet to see the steep increase in Covid-19 cases associated with the omicron variant happening in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. If anything case numbers are currently declining slowly. But the new wave will undoubtedly hit Ireland soon.

UPDATE: not half an hour after I posted this, the HSE announced 7333 new cases of Covid-19 in Ireland, more than double yesterday’s figure and the highest number seen since early January. And this is before the Christmas surge.

The jury is still out on whether omicron is more or less dangerous than previous variants but it is clearly more transmissible, and I don’t see the point of taking chances, so I agree with the Irish Government on the need to take precautions. I don’t think the latest restrictions go anywhere near far enough though.

Yesterday we received at work an email from University management that said, among other things, that

At present the aim is to resume teaching on 31 January, as in Semester 1.

The phrase “as in Semester 1” means that large lectures will be online-only but everything else will be face-to-face. That is a reasonable starting point because the extent of the omicron wave is as yet unknown, but I think it’s more likely than not that in the end we’ll find ourselves doing everything online. I just hope a decision on that is made in reasonable time for us to put Plan B into action. We don’t start lectures again until January 31st and there should be enough data by then to make an informed decision.

I don’t want to sound unduly pessimistic but I don’t see any sign that we are anywhere near the end of this pandemic. With a bit of luck we might find that we’re roughly halfway through, but as long as governments allow large pools of virus to circulate, mutations will continue to occur and new variants will continue to emerge. To end this cycle will require a majority of the world’s population to be vaccinated, and I don’t see that happening soon.

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Boosted!

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19 with tags , , on December 15, 2021 by telescoper

This morning I duly made my way for the third time this year to City West vaccination Centre to get a booster shot of the Moderna vaccine. Given reports of lengthy queues I was prepared for a long wait but that wasn’t the case. I was in and out in 40 minutes including the mandatory 15 minutes after the jab. It was busy, but good organisation kept us all moving steadily. Once again huge thanks are due to the HSE staff and volunteers (including the piano player) for all their efforts!

It could have been even quicker but the computer system had mistakenly registered that I have a history of anaphylaxis (which I don’t) so I had to answer a longer set of questions and wait for my record to be corrected. I guess someone ticked the wrong box the last time I was there!

I didn’t have any serious side effects with my other doses but I am working from home anyway, and don’t have anything scheduled this afternoon, so I can crash out if needs be. In the meantime I’ll get on with some work…

P. S. There seemed to me to be much less nervousness among the people in the queue this time. Everyone was quite chatty. I guess we’re all getting used to this rigmarole now!

Update: 10.20pm. No particularly serious side effects but I’m feeling very tired and achey so am having an early night!

Update: 9.30am the following day. The third dose (booster) has given me a far stronger reaction than the previous two. In particular my left arm (where I had the jab) is so numb as to be virtually useless and all my joints are aching. I’m glad I can stay at home today!

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Art Attack

Posted in Art, Biographical on December 14, 2021 by telescoper

Untitled, by Peter Coles (2021), 2m by 1.2m, chalk dust and oil on panel, Castlebridge Art Museum.

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Last Week Ahead

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education, Maynooth on December 12, 2021 by telescoper

We’re approaching the end of term here at Maynooth University; the forthcoming week is the last week of teaching, after which we have the luxury of a full week without lectures or tutorials before Christmas itself. Apart from eating and drinking I think I’ll spend most of the holiday sleeping. The first official duty I will have in the new year is on Saturday 8th January when one of my online examinations is due to take place. After that it will be all marking papers and after that it will be preparing teaching for Semester 2…

At this start of this academic year I was quite confident that Semester 2 would find us more-or-less back to normal but that now seems very unlikely. I think that we’re going to be starting Semester 2 at the end of January 2022 exactly the same way that we started Semester 2 in January 2021, i.e. with everything fully online.

As of today, the recent rapid growth in Covid-19 infections seems to have slowed (and cases have been decreasing for a few days) but a Christmas surge seems inevitable and with many people having low protection against the omicron variant and very high case numbers even before the festive period, the period from January to March may be very difficult indeed. I stand to be proved wrong, though, and the trajectory of the pandemic is highly uncertain. We’ll just have to wait and see how things turn out. Fingers crossed.

I have explained before on this blog that I am going to be working from home next week, delivering my last lectures from my study and via recordings. I have better facilities for doing online lectures at home, because the University has failed to invest in decent recording equipment in its lecture theatres.

In any case I only have one full lecture to give in my first-year module (due tomorrow); the other two will be revision classes. I have finished the lectures for my second-year module so was just planning to do a revision class in the Tuesday slot. I did have some other (virtual) meetings in my calendar for next week but most of these have all been cancelled for one reason or another.

The one remaining task is to get all the online exams ready to go in January. We haven’t got the special Moodle spaces set up yet, but I imagine that will happen sometime next week.

By the way, when I responded to the close contact alert I received on Friday I was told I’d be sent an antigen test kit from the HSE. I haven’t got it yet but I suppose it may arrive next week. I still don’t have any symptoms though, and am effectively self-isolating anyway, so I’m not concerned. I just hope I get my booster on Wednesday without having to queue for too long…

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Irony Alert!

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19 with tags , on December 10, 2021 by telescoper

Having just started working from home yesterday, this afternoon I received the above message, via the Covid-19 tracker app, saying that I have been a close contact of someone who has tested positive for Covid-19. I don’t have symptoms so don’t have to do anything drastic, just restrict my movements for 5 days. I was going to do the latter anyway, so the timing is somewhat ironic!

Oh and they’re going to send me an “antigen kit”, presumably to keep me occupied for the next few days. It should be fun because I’ve never made an antigen before.

Incidentally the message isn’t very clearly worded. I think I was a close contact on 6th December of someone who subsequently tested positive. That may account for why I have only got this message on 10th!

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R.I.P. Steve Bronski (1960-2021)

Posted in Biographical, LGBTQ+, Music with tags , on December 9, 2021 by telescoper

I was saddened to hear this evening of the death at the age of 61 of Steve Bronski, co-founder of the band Bronski Beat which provided much of the soundtrack of my early twenties. I spent many an hour in the mid-80s dancing away in gay clubs to their up-tempo numbers like Hit That Perfect Beat but, as I’ve mentioned on this blog before, the song Smalltown Boy had a particular resonance for me because it was about thoughts and feelings I knew very well but had never heard expressed in popular music. I really felt like the Smalltown Boy in the song.

Rest in Peace, Steven William Forrest, aka Steve Bronski (1960-2021).

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A Date for a Boost!

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education with tags , , , , on December 9, 2021 by telescoper

After expressing concern about the prospects of getting a timely booster jab last night I received an SMS message offering me an appointment next Wednesday for a shot. The text was sent on 8th December, six months to the day since my second jab (8th June). I will once again have to travel to City West in order to receive it, so will have take some time off work but that’s a small price to pay.

I had inferred (incorrectly) that it would take much longer to get a date for booster because most of the people I know in their sixties haven’t had theirs yet and they are higher priority than me. I now realise that may be because they had the AstraZeneca vaccine, which had a longer interval between first and second doses than the 4 weeks for the Pfizer vaccine I had, so had a later second dose than mine.

My third vaccine dose will be of the Moderna vaccine; the previous two were Pfizer/BioNTech. It seems everyone who is getting a shot this month will be getting the Moderna version as Ireland has a large stock of this vaccine due to expire next month. Although its efficacy against the omicron variant is unknown, I will of course attend the appointment.

Yesterday, before I received the text message announcing my booster shot, I emailed the students in my classes to say the remaining lectures of the term will be online-only because of the high levels of Covid-19 in circulation and my waning immunity. Next week’s booster doesn’t change that as next week is the last week of teaching. My plan is to do the lectures live as webcasts and make the recordings available afterwards, which is how I’ve done them the entire term, except I’ll be doing them from home with no in-person audience. Apart, that is, from next Wednesday, when I’ll only be able to offer a pre-recorded lecture as I’ll be at City West when the lecture is scheduled. That will be my last lecture of the Semester, as most of my teaching is concentrated in the early part of the week.

Owing to a combination of Covid-19, Storm Barra and no doubt sheer exhaustion, student attendance at lectures and tutorials on campus has fallen sharply, though attendance at my second-year class has remained quite high. On Tuesday the campus was virtually deserted but about 70% of my class for Vector Calculus & Fourier Series were there. Somehiw, though, I don’t think they’ll mind too much watching the remaining couple of lectures from the comfort of their homes!

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For Those in Peril on the Sea

Posted in Biographical, Politics on December 7, 2021 by telescoper

News that winds up to 156 km/h associated with Storm Barra were recorded earlier this morning at Fastnet Lighthouse made me think of the brave lifeboat crews who put to sea in such conditions to save lives around the UK and Irish coasts. That in turn put me in mind of the hymn Eternal Father Strong to Save which I used to sing in the church choir when I was a boy and of which I can still remember most of the words:

This hymn gains extra poignancy given the tragic incident in the English Channel a few weeks ago when 27 people drowned when their boat was swamped by water in rough weather.

Thinking of Storm Barra, the desperate refugees attempting to cross the Channel, and the reports of people attempting to stop a lifeboat from launching, I decided to make a donation to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) and encourage you, if you are able, to do likewise. You can do so here.

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Storm Barra Approaches

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags , on December 6, 2021 by telescoper

I’m going to have an early night tonight as tomorrow promises to be a very “interesting” day. A large Atlantic weather system – Storm Barra – is heading towards Ireland and is expected to reach the South West coast around 3am tomorrow morning. It is expected to last about two hours.

As if the winds in excess of 130 km/h were not bad enough, the storm will reach the coast just before a very high tide so flooding is expected, especially near Cork.

Colleges and schools in the Red and Orange alert areas will be closed tomorrow. Maynooth is in a Yellow alert area so the current plan is for the University to remain open, but it may change to Orange overnight and I suspect a significant number of staff and students will not be able to make it in anyway.

I’ll leave it there for tonight and update tomorrow.

UPDATE: 9.20am. It was very windy from about 6am and is now raining very heavily. Some branches have come down but no serious damage done near where I am.

Update: 14:20pm. Winds steadily backing as the depression moves out across the Irish Sea, now North-Easterly bringing colder air.

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Exams in the Time of Covid

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth on December 5, 2021 by telescoper

Not an online examination

With two weeks of teaching to go before the Christmas break in Maynooth we now have a settled plan for our January examinations in the Department of Theoretical Physics. We have decided that all our examinations will be done online, as we have done for all cycles of examinations since May 2020.

It seems that most other third-level education institutions – certainly the “traditional” universities have their examinations in December. At NUI Galway, for example, the examination session starts tomorrow (Monday 6th December) and their examinations will be on campus, despite the objections of the Students’ Union. This is also the case at Trinity College and University College Dublin, though University College Cork is doing most of its December exams online.

Our original plan at Maynooth was to have examinations on campus in January and some students were unhappy at the decision to revert to online examinations. The representations I heard from students in the Department of Theoretical Physics all gave the same reason: that online examinations are more difficult than on-campus examinations. I think this is the opposite of what students in other disciplines might think, but our online assessments focus to a greater extent on problem-solving tasks than the on-campus examinations, which means they are more difficult to do by rote learning and regurgitation.

An open-book exam is obviously easier if it simply requires students to look things up in their notes, textbooks or the web. Such an assessment would not only be easier, but also in my view absolutely pointless. Indeed, any exam, whether online or not, that requires students to use their brains only as memory devices is basically worthless. So our approach is to concentrate on the application of principles learned rather than bookwork.

Anyway, back to the on-campus versus on-line issue. I think campus exam venues, if arranged sufficiently carefully, need not be in themselves be places of high risk for Covid-19 risk, but large numbers of students will have to travel to and from them at the same time, largely on public transport, and there will also be a significant amount of milling around before and after. Large lectures (in the case of Maynooth this means over 250) are being delivered online at all Irish universities and exam halls will frequently have to hold greater numbers than that. It therefore seems to me rather inconsistent to insist on having large exams in person.

Finally, I’ll just note that all my colleagues (lecturers and tutors) are reporting a drop-off in student attendance at lectures and tutorials.  Last Friday the campus was extremely quiet, and I had only about half the expected class in my Vector Calculus lecture. This happens a bit in a “normal” year towards the end of term but is more marked this time round. I’m not surprised at it. With around 5000 new Covid cases per day I think many students are anxious not about lectures but about travelling on public transport and having to wait about on campus outside in the cold. I have been recording all my lectures this term and I don’t mind if students choose to view them remotely. Although we’re still officially teaching on campus, in practice many students are doing their learning online.

 

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