This semester I was given back Special Relativity & Classical Field Theory course to teach. I already had notes for this, but I guess I could improve this further, particularly the classical field theory. When I took the classical field theory course in University of Adelaide, I learned even the retarded and advanced Green's function for electromagnetic waves. However, since this is a combined course with special relativity (which was a 2 credit course in Adelaide), perhaps it is unfair to go too deep into classical field theory. I contemplated also whether one should go for some more modern materials, like group theoretical aspects or even supersymmetry as found in Schwarz & Schwarz's book. But these are rather optional topics.
There is another course that I should be teaching (two courses per academic staff not holding any admin post). Initially, I thought it was the second course of quantum mechanics (the combination I had two semesters ago). However, I was given the postgraduate seminar course(s) to handle. This, indeed, was a surprise. It will be a new experience for me and the type of assessment is pretty much subjective (so had to learn all these rubric stuffs). My own concern for this course is not too much the assessment but what they are getting out of it. I thought I should make the students learn about seminar as a community activity (traditions, contributing back to the community) and how I think seminar should be conducted. The latter, in particular, is important since many talks I've seen from students are prepared in a way as a report to be read linearly, with references right at the end. For me, this should be stopped. It should be prepared with instant and nonlinear reading in mind since the audience do not have the luxury of flipping over the slides. For me, references should be written as footnotes on the very same slide where they are cited (instantaneously the audience know what the reference is).
So the week that has passed was the first week of teaching (it was also a convocation week). I have opted to teach Special Relativity fully face-to-face because to me, it does not make too much sense to have partly online and partly face-to-face. So, we had the first lecture on the Wednesday morning. In the afternoon, one of the students who attended contacted me and told me that she had Covid-19 (did not know at first as she thought what she had was normal and she was fasting). First, I was wondering what one should do but in any case, I thought it is best that the department should know. When I reported it to the department, I was not hoping for anything (like making the class online) but I intend to carry on with the face-to-face class as I remembered the current SOP for closed contact is that there is no need for quarantine if there are no symptoms. The department's response was that I should try to do hybrid teaching, having both face-to-face and online mode simultaneously. Well, that is going to be a challenge since I could not even get the room's projector in the first class and did the teaching using the white board. However, I accepted the challenge and thought of using the theory group's portable projector. So the next morning, did try that and got it to work (see pic below) but the signal was rather unstable. Also I had to used my own broadband wi-fi as the wi-fi in the room was too weak. Finally asked for help from the Faculty's staff just to get the room's projector to work. Finally, we did get the hybrid class going.
For the graduate classes, we were given the permission to do them online. So, I did the briefing for the Graduate Seminar class on the Wednesday afternoon. The only problem with this class, there are five different subject codes (corresponding to different stages of the graduate's study), all combined into a single Wednesday afternoon class, and there is no central listing of the registered students. So had to announce the briefing through word of mouth. Even as I try to finalise the schedule for the students' presentation yesterday, there were still new additions to the class. Hopefully, I will get all the students by this week, so that the presentation schedule can be finalised soon. Below is a pic of the briefing.
Two other interesting things happened last week. First, the announcement of the 2022 Abel Prize on Wednesday evening. It was awarded to Dennis Sullivan. I was aware of his work on topology (various aspects) but did not know the details. Posted this in the institute's WhatsApp group. There seems to be little excitement on the news in the Malaysian scene, perhaps because no one is really working in this area here. Was wondering whether I should learn part of his work just to get people excited. The other thing was INSPEM's event of holding an online conversation with Dr. Aid Fawzal of the Fawzal number fame. I remembered reading about him in the social media. I do not know much about his work but it seems to be in computational fluid dynamics. He was pretty humble in the conversation, mentioning he had academic difficulties (due to dyslexia) in the beginning but he worked his way around it and managed to grab international attention. Below are some pics of the event.
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