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Just Chat! / Are the first year lectures the best?
« on: 13/03/2024 01:40:41 »
Hi.
Recall the first year at University, college or whatever it was called that you may have gone to? The lectures seemed great.
In the later year(s), the lectures did not seem as good. Why?
Is it these things:
(i) Many of the well established staff have become involved in the first year lectures. They were often presented by lecturers that had been running the course for years and had a lot of good material, maybe practical demos, video clips etc. ready and good to go.
By comparison, in the later years, the course may only run every other year instead of every year and the lecturers assigned may not be the most experienced staff. While they were certainly competent and sufficiently experienced in the area, they just would have had some teaching time left to allocate while other staff may not. As mentioned, many of the professors were already allocated to the compulsory courses with the really big numbers of students and, I suspect, did genuinely enjoy introducing the topic(s) to the new students and running those courses.
(ii) The beginning of everything just always will seem more interesting. There are so many directions to go off in and you will see many snippets of more specialised things that are genuinely interesting and seem attractive.
By comparison, when you're actually doing the specialised courses, you find that although there are some genuinely interesting and elegant bits, a lot of it isn't so elegant. The whole area may still be quite near the frontier of knowledge and the technqiues will be much more practical, based on numerical approximations, computer simulations or basically "clumsy", messy and inelegant. It will take some years before some of it is refined into something more elegant and the bits that may have been going in the wrong direction are discarded. By which time, of course, this version will have found its way into the courses in the earlier years - so the stuff in the specialised courses will always tend to be the less refined and raw stuff.
---- Anyway, I don't know... maybe it's something else. I'm now watching a few lectures online and I've noticed the same trend again: The later years lectures are just not as good or as well polished. Is this just how it is all the time and everywhere?
Best Wishes.
Recall the first year at University, college or whatever it was called that you may have gone to? The lectures seemed great.
In the later year(s), the lectures did not seem as good. Why?
Is it these things:
(i) Many of the well established staff have become involved in the first year lectures. They were often presented by lecturers that had been running the course for years and had a lot of good material, maybe practical demos, video clips etc. ready and good to go.
By comparison, in the later years, the course may only run every other year instead of every year and the lecturers assigned may not be the most experienced staff. While they were certainly competent and sufficiently experienced in the area, they just would have had some teaching time left to allocate while other staff may not. As mentioned, many of the professors were already allocated to the compulsory courses with the really big numbers of students and, I suspect, did genuinely enjoy introducing the topic(s) to the new students and running those courses.
(ii) The beginning of everything just always will seem more interesting. There are so many directions to go off in and you will see many snippets of more specialised things that are genuinely interesting and seem attractive.
By comparison, when you're actually doing the specialised courses, you find that although there are some genuinely interesting and elegant bits, a lot of it isn't so elegant. The whole area may still be quite near the frontier of knowledge and the technqiues will be much more practical, based on numerical approximations, computer simulations or basically "clumsy", messy and inelegant. It will take some years before some of it is refined into something more elegant and the bits that may have been going in the wrong direction are discarded. By which time, of course, this version will have found its way into the courses in the earlier years - so the stuff in the specialised courses will always tend to be the less refined and raw stuff.
---- Anyway, I don't know... maybe it's something else. I'm now watching a few lectures online and I've noticed the same trend again: The later years lectures are just not as good or as well polished. Is this just how it is all the time and everywhere?
Best Wishes.