The First Week

My New Year wish (if any) is to make my life devoid of negative feelings. Within less than a week, this wish is destroyed when I heard that another one of my FYP students was getting damaging criticisms, to the point of possibly not following my earlier suggestions. Before this, one of my FYP student decided to change her education research because of suggestions made by her assessors during her seminar to include multimedia packages. Sincerely, I have seen some multimedia projects before this, that does not provide any real physical insight in understanding the physics content, apart from mere flashy animations. I would rather have her probe into some conceptual difficulties in undergraduate quantum mechanics. Here is one recent paper that does so (hey look, no animations). More papers can be found in this open access journal Physical Review Physics Education Research. The student finally gave up this idea of studying conceptual difficulties in quantum mechanics, and look into issues in high school curriculum instead. My style of supervision is that I tend to let students decide what they think is best for themselves but whatever it is, they need to show the level of work enough for a final year project. So here again, I'm confronted with another case. It really gets on my nerves. I welcome constructive criticisms but they must know enough to do so. Again, I let the student decide what he thinks is best for him and will not force anyone to do anything that he is uncomfortable with. Feeling annoyed, that night my blood pressure rose to 151/113 and had severe headache.

Theoretical physics has always been tough for our students because our curriculum tend to be skewed towards more applied nature. Students often run away from theoretical physics even without the encouragement of others to do so. Often there is a wide gap for students to cross over into theoretical research. Thus, for undergraduate research project, I do not expect them to do any original research (unless they are really good) but I do expect them to do their own calculations. Sometimes I do wish that those who criticise us (our students), would have a go at doing such theoretical problems. This is not to say that they can't do them, but merely to experience the difficulties. I certainly would not interfere on what should be done in experimental projects because I have no experience in them and I know that each has their own types of difficulties. To rub salt to my wounds, there are already remarks that one should not take many students and we have not trained well our theoretical physics students.

So largely the first week of January has been difficult for me and I have lots of things on my mind. Have always had headaches as I reach home from office. Yesterday was really bad and my BP was 150/115 with a severe headache. The headache prolonged into the night, until sometime before midnight, until my other half said I should go to the hospital. The fear was it may turn into a stroke if it went on and also we were hoping to do a CT-scan since the headache was already for a few days (after work). We went to Columbia Hospital but we were directed to Hospital Tuanku Jaafar. Blood test was done and my headache subsided and was released this morning near 4am. Was given medical leave for today.