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Self-isolating…

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , on August 23, 2021 by telescoper

This time last week I started trying to readjust to working from my office in Maynooth University but I’ve already had to put that on pause (hopefully temporarily).

Over the last several days I’ve been experiencing bouts of sneezing, a frequent runny nose, some sinus pressyre, and uncomfortably dry eyes. These seem to me symptoms of hay-fever (though it is a bit late in the year for that) or some other allergy, rather than Covid-19, but based on what I’ve read about the so-called Delta variant I phoned my GP.

I don’t have the more usual symptoms of Covid-19 (neither cough nor sore throat nor fever) – in fact I don’t really fall unwell at all apart from the sporadic sneezing – so my GP said he thought it was very unlikely to be the Coronavirus. I’m also fully vaccinated, though that doesn’t mean I can be infected. Nevertheless he recommended I self-isolate as a precaution for a few days to see what, if anything, develops. So that is what I am doing.

I’m supposed to be recording video material for orientation week, which I can do just as easily at home. To counter the sneezing I’ll just record everything in small chunks.

As for the symptoms, my money is on some kind of allergy, but I wonder what? I’ve never experienced hay-fever in late August before!

Anyway, I’m glad this has happened before the start of teaching: as we’re supposed to do lectures and tutorials in person from next month, a person who is self-isolating won’t be able to teach and we have so few staff it will be difficult to find cover…

Update: the likeliest explanation seems to be a fungal spore allergy, as the release of fungal spores is triggered by crop harvesting. Maynooth is in an agricultural area and August is harvest time. Allergens of this sort also thrive in humid weather which we certainly have had recently.

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Vaccination for Lectures?

Posted in Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , on August 20, 2021 by telescoper

The full guidelines on the return to on-campus teaching in September that I referred to on Monday have now been distributed to all staff, not without comment.

Basically the new advice is that in-person teaching will return in September (in fact a month from today in Maynooth) for all forms of class except lectures containing over 250 people, which will be online. Lecture halls and labs will be at full capacity, i.e. with no social distancing requirement. Students will be “asked” to wear face coverings, but we are told not to attempt to enforce this. Importantly, there will be no requirement for students to have been vaccinated in order to attend lectures.

In Ireland there is a vaccination passport system so that those who wish to dine indoors at a bar or restaurant have to show vaccination status. Perhaps someone can explain to me how it makes sense for this to be a requirement in a restaurant while it is not a requirement for a student having to sit for an hour in close proximity to up to 249 others with no social distancing and no mandatory face coverings.

This conundrum is taken to another level of absurdity when you consider that a student wishing to get lunch indoors on campus will presumably have to show their vaccine passport?

There is an article here that argues that a safe return in the presence of the delta-variant requires 90% of the student population to have been vaccinated.

A more acceptable plan would have students show their vaccination status when enrolling on the course. Those who are unvaccinated but willing to have a vaccination shot could be vaccinated there and then and be allowed to attend lectures when the vaccine takes effect. Or I should say “could have been” because the facilities required to do on-campus vaccinations have not been set up and now there probably isn’t time. Those that refuse to have a vaccine should attend lectures online on a permanent basis.

(How such a scheme would be policed is a difficult question: we don’t usually have people on the doors of lecture theatres checking student IDs or anything and there is a far greater rate of traffic at the start of a lecture than you would have at a restaurant…)

There will of course be some students who are at very high risk and should not be attending lectures anyway even if vaccinated. For them we should be providing lecture recordings. Unfortunately I don’t think we have good enough facilities to record live lectures from theatres as there has been inadequate investment in cameras etc. If we’re told we have to provide lecture recordings, for many of us that means doing the lectures twice. And so our workload increases.

On the other hand it seems increasingly likely to me that all this will be irrelevant. New case numbers are running at about 1800 per day, a level that the HSE admits to being “unsustainable”. When the first colleges return in September, a substantial surge can be expected and everything will be back online anyway.

It’s like déjà vu all over again…

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A period of readjustment..

Posted in Covid-19, Education, Maynooth on August 15, 2021 by telescoper

It’s been a rather busy weekend as I’ve tried to complete the grading my repeat examinations. I’m almost done but I have six more scripts to do, which I will finish tomorrow morning. Once again I’ve set a bad example by being later than everyone else, but at least I’m not going to miss the deadline. We have our Examination Board on Friday and they’ll all be done and dusted by then.

Friday is 20th August, which means it’s exactly a month from then until the start of teaching in Semester 1 of the new academic year. We have now received draft instructions on how this is planned to start. They are not in final form yet, having been circulated to Heads of Department for comments. I’ll refrain from saying more in public until they are published but in a nutshell we are anticipating more-or-less a full return to on-campus teaching with no reduced capacity in lecture theatres but with slightly shorter lectures and staggered start and end times.

That is if everything is under control in a month. The latest Covid-19 figures are not reassuring. The latest 7-day rolling average is about 1800 new cases to day, which is as high as it was in January. Hospitalizations are increasing, though at a lower level than before presumably because of the vaccination effect. Mortality rates are unclear (to me) because of the continuing disruption to reporting caused by the HSE computer problem. I’m very conscious that all our plans were changed at the last minute at the start of last academic year, so we’ll just have to wait and see. Hopefully the incidence rate will stop rising over the next few weeks.

On Friday I took a prospective PhD student and his family for a walk around campus, mainly to introduce them to the famous Library Cat (who is fine, by the way, but bothered by wasps getting into his dish when I fed him). Most staff and research students in the Department are still working from home, but there were one or two people around to say hello. When I entered my office I saw I hadn’t changed the date on my calendar since June 15th, two months ago. By the look of the sports fields at the back of the college they haven’t been mown for much longer than that: at the moment they look more like hayfields!

I have been fairly content working from home over the summer (with two interruptions for travelling to Cardiff and back), but I really have to get into the habit of going to the office if we’re going to welcome students in person. I think when I’ve finished my marking tomorrow morning I’ll start trying to get back into the routine. For one thing quite a few things we moved before lockdown need to be moved back to their proper places. When I was waiting for the train from Cardiff on Thursday I saw railway workers removing the social distancing signs from the platform. I guess we’ll be doing that too.

I do hope all this isn’t premature, but I have a nagging feeling…

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Pointless Postscript

Posted in Biographical, Education with tags , , on August 5, 2021 by telescoper

Since my recent post about Latin I’ve been wracking my brain trying the remember the textbook we used at school to learn Latin grammar. Now, with the aid of an old school friend, I know the answer:

Part 2 took us up to O-level, but I think we used Part 1 in earlier years alongside the Cambridge Latin Course featuring the famous character Caecilius:

Caecilius was a resident of Pompeii and he snuffed it during the eruption of Vesuvius at the end of the first set of (orange) books, but the course continued with different characters in different coloured books including one set based in Britain.

The books by Wilding are very traditional grammar school texts. They weren’t easy going for us kids, and were quite formal and with some difficult exercises. They’re probably too old-fashioned to be in use now, but I’m tempted to acquire copies to see how much I remember!

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Thoughts of Return

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education, Maynooth on August 4, 2021 by telescoper

So here I am sitting at home supervising my first online repeat examination supplemental assessment. I’ve only had a couple of minor queries so I’ve been able to get on with other things, among which I noticed that according to the news Universities and Colleges in Ireland have announced that

The rapid progress in the Covid vaccination programme has injected a new level of confidence about maximising the return to higher education, and preparations are at an advanced stage.

That’s great. Presumably at some point the University authorities will communicate these preparations which are at an advanced stage to the staff who will have to implement them. I would have thought we might get to hear about them before they are presented to the media, but perhaps the details for Maynooth haven’t been worked out yet. In which case they’re not really advanced. Or perhaps the plan will be what it has been throughout the pandemic: leave everything to Heads of Department to sort out.

The press release is here by the way. What it contains is rather vague but it does contain some specific things about staggered start and end times for lectures and contraflow into and out of buildings, so if we’re going to do that we’ll have to know what it involves. I am mindful however of the debacle last year when we made elaborate plans that then had to be ditched when the Covid-19 situation deteriorated. After getting my fingers burned that way last year I’m going to wait until the last possible moment before making concrete plans.

While I’m very happy about the prospect of returning to campus I’ve suddenly realized my positive feelings are tempered with a strange and unfamiliar sense of anxiety. The first teaching sessions of next academic year are in the week beginning September 20th. At that point it will have been 18 months since I last stood up in front of a full lecture theatre. It will be a strange experience after such a long period during which I’ve been doing my teaching by talking into a camera. Will I be able to remember how to do it? I think I’ll be quite nervous, actually. I don’t normally get nervous when giving lectures but already feel it. Perhaps it will pass.

Another thing that occurred to me is that as well as the brand new intake I will have students in my second year whose faces I’ve never seen!

Anyway, all that’s for next month. For the time being it’s back to the repeat examinations. While I’ve been typing this, two have been submitted….

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Repeat Message..

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on August 3, 2021 by telescoper

Back to work after yesterday’s Bank Holiday and almost immediately it’s the repeat examination period at Maynooth University, which starts tomorrow. Technically these examinations are called supplemental assesssments, but we generally call them repeats.

My first supplemental assessment is tomorrow afternoon, actually. I have another on Thursday and three next week. All these papers are to be held online as has been the case for the past year and a bit. Perhaps the next set of examinations in January 2022 will be back to normal, but we have to wait and see about that.

The main purpose of writing this post was to wish all students taking exams this month the very best of luck!

I also thought it was worth mentioning for any university teachers out there reading this that although they are held at roughly the same time of year in the two countries there’s a difference in the way resits are handled in the institutions I’ve worked at in the United Kingdom and the way repeats work here in Maynooth which is implied by the slightly different name.

In UK institutions with which I am familiar students generally take resits when, because they have failed one or more examinations during the year,  they have not accumulated sufficient credits to proceed to the next year of their course. Passing the resit allows them to retrieve lost credit, but their mark is generally capped at a bare pass (usually 40%). That means the student gets the credit they need for their degree but their average (which determines whether they get 1st, 2nd or 3rd class Honours) is negatively affected.

This is the case unless a student has extenuating circumstances affecting the earlier examination, such as bad health or family emergency, in which case they take the resit as a `sit’, i.e. for the first time with an uncapped mark.

Here in Maynooth, repeat examinations are generally taken for the same reasons as in the UK but the mark obtained is not capped. Indeed, some students – though not many – elect to take the repeat examination even if they passed earlier in the summer, in order to increase their average mark. Because of the difficult circumstances this year the usual fees for a repeat examination are waived for Maynooth students this time, but I haven’t seen a noticeable increase in the number of students taking repeat papers.

When I’ve told former UK colleagues that our repeat examinations are not capped they generally  don’t  like the idea because they feel that it might lead to many students playing games, i.e. deliberately not taking exams in May with the intention of spreading some of their examination load into August. There’s not much sign of students actually doing that here, to be honest, for the reason that the results from the repeat examination period are not confirmed until early September so that students that deploy this strategy do not know whether they are going to be able to start their course until a couple of weeks before term. That could cause lots of problems securing accommodation, etc, so it doesn’t seem to me to be a good strategy.

I’d welcome comments for or against whether resits/repeats should be capped/uncapped and on what practice is adopted in your institution(s).

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On Lúnasa

Posted in Biographical, Education, History, Irish Language, Maynooth on August 1, 2021 by telescoper

It’s the first of August which means it is the ancient Celtic festival of Lughnasadh (which, in modern Irish, is Lúnasa). This coincides with the English Lammas Day one of many Christian festivals which have pagan origins. Traditionally 1st August marks the start of the harvest season and is celebrated accordingly, with rites involving the first fruit and bread baked from flour obtained from the first corn.

Tomorrow being the first Monday in August it is a Bank Holiday in Ireland called Lá Saoire i mí Lúnasa. This holiday was created by the Bank Holiday Act of 1871 when Ireland was under British rule. While the holiday was subsequently moved to the end of August in England and Wales it has remained at the start of August in Ireland, which is a far better place for it in my opinion.

In the Northern hemisphere, from an astronomical point of view, the solar year is defined by the two solstices (summer, around June 21st and winter, around December 21st) and the equinoxes (spring, around March 21st, and Autumn, around September 21st). These four events divide the year into four roughly equal parts of about 13 weeks each.

Now, if you divide each of these intervals in two you divide the year into eight pieces of six and a bit weeks each. The dates midway between the astronomical events mentioned above are (roughly) :

  • 1st February: Imbolc (Candlemas)
  • 1st May: Beltane (Mayday)
  • 1st August: Lughnasadh (Lammas)
  • 1st November: Samhain (All Saints Day)

The names I’ve added are taken from the Celtic/neo-Pagan (and Christian terms) for these cross-quarter days. These timings are rough because the dates of the equinoxes and solstices vary from year to year. Imbolc is often taken to be the 2nd of February (Groundhog Day) and Samhain is sometimes taken to be October 31st, Halloween. But hopefully you get the point.

Incidentally, the last three of these also coincide closely with Bank Holidays in Ireland, though these are always on Mondays so often happen a few days away. I find it intriguing that the academic year for universities here in Ireland is largely defined by the above dates dates.

The first semester of the academic year 2021/22 starts on September 20th 2021 (the Autumnal Equinox is on September 22nd) and finishes on 17th December (the Winter Solstice is on December 21st ).  Halloween (31st October) is actually a Sunday this year so the related bank holiday is on Monday 25th October; half term (study week) always includes the Halloween Bank Holiday. The term is pushed forward a bit because it finishes on a Friday and it would not be acceptable to end it on Christmas Eve!

After a break for Christmas and a three-week mid-year exam period Semester Two starts 31st January 2022. Half-term is then from 14th to 18th March (the Vernal Equinox; is on March 20th) and teaching ends on May 6th.  More exams and end of year business take us to the Summer Solstice and the (hypothetical) vacation.

So we’re basically operating on a pagan calendar.

Another tradition seems to be that examinations come straight after bank holidays, both in May and August. The repeat examination period begins on August 4th this year. You can interpret that in two ways: one is that students have a guaranteed day off to do revision; the other is that the bank holidays in May and August are ruined by the need to prepare for exams…

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The Joy of Latin

Posted in Biographical, Education, Politics with tags , , , on July 31, 2021 by telescoper

This morning I noticed a story in the Guardian that Latin is to be taught in 40 UK state secondary schools had provoked some rather extreme reactions on social media. I hesitated to comment on this lest it appear that I have any respect or confidence in Gavin Williamson (who is undoubtedly one of the stupidest politicians in living memory) or that I don’t think there may be better things on which to spend £4m, but I have to say that I don’t think this is as stupid an idea as many people seem to think.

For what it’s worth I think that learning Latin (which I did from age 11 to O-level at aged 16, where which it was my best subject. If you’re interested here is the examination paper I took way back in 1979:

I not only enjoyed it enormously but also found it useful for learning other languages as well as helping to understand English grammar. There are many aspects of the English language that I only understood when I learned about them in Latin, and that also helped me with French and German where things like the subjunctive are much more obvious than they are in English and also much more precise, which makes them easier to identify and understand.

Latin has important elements in common with a great many Indo-European languages besides the obvious Italian, Spanish and French, including the Germanic languages (which include English). I did French to O-level too, by the way, but only did one year of German because I wasn’t allowed to do three languages to O-level alongside the full complement of science and mathematics. I have managed to get by during my frequent visits to Italy pretty well without having formally studied any Italian, though I find it easier to read and listen to Italian than to speak it. I have to say, though, that Latin hasn’t helped me much at all in my struggles to learn Irish…

Above all, though, learning Latin taught me that as well as being a tool for communication, language is fascinating in itself. There are strong connections between linguistics and genetics, for example – ideas in genetics on how you can work backwards from common elements in current diverse populations to the “last common ancestor” came from historical linguistics.. Languages evolve through mutation and intermingling in much the same way that populations do.

The relationships between different languages are deep and mysterious but studying their common structures helps bring them to light. That’s how the physical sciences work too…

It has long been an intention of mine to try to re-learn Latin when I retire and have a go at translating some old texts into English. It’s much easier to learn new languages when you are young but hopefully having done it when I was young it might come back reasonably easy. I remember quite a lot actually, but need more practice. Perhaps I’ll get the time before too long.

P. S. I’ve heard it said that, instead of teaching the Latin language in schools, students would be better off learning Latin dance, e.g the tango. My response to that is that “tango” is the first person singular in the present indicative of the Latin verb “tangere” (to touch)…

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New Term Ahead!

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , , on July 28, 2021 by telescoper

I know that there are quite a few people out there who think the summer is one long holiday for academic staff. Well, it may still be July but after my 10 days away that’s the holidays over as far as I’m concerned. Still, ten days’ summer holiday is ten days more holiday than I got last summer.

Next week the Repeat Examination period begins; it lasts from 4th August to 14th August. Once again these examinations are online and once again they have to be supervised by a member of academic staff. I have five paper scheduled and have to be at the screen for all of them. Then there’s the marking, checking, collation and uploading of the marks which must be done by 18th August. After that there’s an Examination Board before the final submission of all the repeat exams by August 23rd.

Incidentally, I was just checking over my Semester 1 repeat examinations and it seems like decades since I taught those modules last Autumn! The pandemic has played havoc with the perception of time!

After the Repeat Examinations are done, I have the unenviable task of preparing teaching for the next academic year. Although I’m stepping down as Head of Department of Theoretical Physics at the end of September I am still in that position until then so that task falls to me. Quite apart from the continuing uncertainty about what the Covid-19 situation will be like at the start of term (20th September), I have to deal with the fact that three out of our six full-time permanent lecturers are not available for next year. One is retiring this summer, one is departing for a position in Germany and another is on sabbatical.

The appointment of a temporary lecturer to provide sabbatical cover is normal, but the two other departures have not been replaced with permanent staff but by two one-year temporary lecturers. None of these new staff will be in post until 1st September but will have to teach a full complement of modules from 20th September onwards. Half our modules will therefore have to be reassigned, which means that the organization of teaching for the new academic year is not just the usual slight rearrangement of the previous year’s assignments but a major overhaul.

Losing two of our permanent staff to be replaced by temporary staff will of course have a negative impact on our research but that doesn’t seem to be important.

On top of al this the University is pressing ahead with a complete reorganization in the form of a merger of the Departments of Theoretical Physics and Experimental Physics which it intends to force through by 1st October 2021…

While glad that we may at last be emerging from the pandemic I’m dreading the next two months, not only because of the huge amount that has to be done by the end of September, but also because I think that period is going to set the scene for the longer-term future. I know I’m not the only academic who fears the massively increased workload dumped on us during the pandemic is going to become, to use a hackneyed phrase, “the new normal”.

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Interaction in Lectures

Posted in Biographical, Education on July 6, 2021 by telescoper

There’s been dismay among many students at the University of Manchester at the news that said institution is planning to keep lectures online next year. If the reason for that decision were that campuses are likely to be closed again by September then I would consider it wise, but it seems this is to be a permanent thing; see the following excerpt.

The clear assumption here is that large lectures never involve interaction. I can think of many colleagues besides myself who would object to that most strongly. Even in a big lecture hall interaction is key to the learning experience. The thing the above statement misses entirely is the extent to which the presence of an audience actually helps the lecturer to improve the learning experience for the students. It’s astonishing to me that the person quoted above seems to think interaction only happens in one direction! On the contrary, a lecture is – or should be – a shared experience between lecturer and students.

If you think about it is a very strange situation when someone stands up in front of a bunch of students and lectures at them for an hour or more. I frequently have the best part of a 100 people watching, and occasionally listening to, me drone on about something or other. What’s strange is that all those people see basically the same thing, whereas the lecturer gets to see all their different facial expressions, at least the lecturer can when the lecture is in person not online with everyone’s video muted.

I’m one of those people who finds it very difficult to give a lecture without looking at the audience, which is why I’ve found the transition to online teaching so difficult. It’s partly to try to establish some kind of rapport with them, notably in order to encourage them to answer when I ask a question or to offer questions of their own, but also to try to figure out whether anyone at all is following what I’m saying. Not all students are helpful in this regard, but some have very responsive mannerisms, nodding when they understand and frowning when they don’t. When I’m teaching a class for the first time I usually look around a lot in an attempt to identify those students who are likely to help me gauge how well things are going. Usually,  there are only a few barometers like this but I would be lost without them. Fortunately most students seem to sit in the same place in the theatre for each lecture so you can usually locate the useful ones fairly easily, with a discreet look around before you  start.

Most other students seem to have a default lecture face.  The expressions range from a perpetual scowl to a vacant smile (each of which is in its own way a bit scary). There’s the “wish I wasn’t here” face of pure boredom,  not to mention those who are fast asleep; I don’t mind them as long as they don’t snore. There’s the Bookface of someone who’s not listening but messing around on Facebook, and the inscrutable ones whose faces are masks, even when not literally wearing a mask, yielding no clues as to what, if anything, is going on behind. The brightest students often seem to belong to the last group, although I haven’t done a statistical study of this so that must be taken as purely anecdotal.

Anyway, by way of a bit of audience participation if you can be bothered, here’s a poll. If you don’t know what your own lecture face is, then you could always ask, that is if you’re one of the lucky folks who’s actually been in a lecture at all as opposed to sitting in your room watching a recording.

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