Open Book Varia

Yesterday, my youngest son took his swab test at school and was the first one who took it. My other half took him there since I am considered a person of high risk. Did my duty of getting breakfast for the whole family though, after which I felt a little dizzy due to not having enough sleep. The results of the swab test should be known today. Hopefully it is negative, for otherwise the whole family will have to take a swab test.

This morning (few hours later), my students will be facing their final exam for statistical mechanics. Due to the online nature, it will be an open book test with four questions to answer out of a choice of five. The duration is for two hours and thus they have only half an hour for each - they will not have enough time to discuss. Doing an open book test is not easy. Since they can refer to notes, books and the whole of internet, the questions will not be direct but something which test their understanding. They should have seen the techniques to solve the problems before and hence doable. Thus, it requires some amount of thinking - exposing them to some problem solving techniques during the semester and then just put a different problem for the exam. Few questions will require description based type of answers to see whether they have understood the concepts.

Overall, I was not too happy with my teaching but I do hope they feel some form of excitement learning new things perhaps with some advanced ideas. If I have the chance to teach the subject, I will probably use a different book, an easier one. That will also mean I have to redo my notes again, if so. I know that for next semester, I will be teaching Special Relativity and Classical Field Theory (one course) and Advanced Quantum Mechanics (for another). So I might not meet the course again since I will be near retirement - in some way, I prefer to focus on quantum mechanics, perhaps gather my notes into a book. This will make my life a little easier. However, I leave this decision to be open.

Talking about openness, there is a nice blog post by Dave Snowden, "https://www.cognitive-edge.com/start-a-journey-with-a-sense-of-direction/" which begins with his own quote "The single most fundamental error of the last three decades is to try and design an idealised future state rather than working the evolutionary potential of the here and now, the adjacent possibles – it is impossible to gain consensus in the former, easier in the latter". Been following him for a while but I rarely see people here discuss about him, not sure why. He co-authored this field guide to managing complexity. Hope to read it at some point.

Final point of being open - I believe that I have been open to most people but being open does not make one should be comfortable with rudeness, which tend to come with all this cynical culture prevalent among social media users. A bit turned off.