A month to go
Iāve been a bit preoccupied these recent weeks so it was with a shock that I realised that weāre into Week 9, which means just four weeks (including this one) until the end of term and just a month before Christmas. Teaching finishes here in Maynooth on Friday 19th December, but I donāt have any lectures on Fridays so in my case it will finish the day before (with a tutorial). I donāt know how many students will be there, but the module concerned is my 4th year Mathematical Physics module and the students are very hard-working, so I think most will attend. After such a busy term Iām sure that they will need a break as much as I will.
I had to rejig the schedule for both modules I am teaching this semester to accommodate the introduction of in-class tests to replace take-home assignments (for reasons I outlined here). Iāve also been handing out voluntary exercises for practice, not counting towards the module mark but for formative reasons. Both modules are mathematical in nature, and I think the best way to learn mathematics is by doing itā¦
Despite the changes with respect to last year, I am still roughly on track. In my Engineering Mathematics module Iāve just finished Laplace transforms, and will start Fourier methods tomorrow. With the mathematical physicists, I am in the middle of complex analysis, having done complex differentiation and conformal mappings and starting complex integration next week.
I still have a couple more class tests to get through. On the positive side, the students are turning up for them and have expressed approval for the fact that they donāt have compulsory homework to do off-campus. This form of assessment is undoubtedly harder work for the students, itās also better preparation for the examination that take-home assignments.
Weāve just received the draft examination timetable for January, and Iām pleased that both of the examinations for which I am responsible will take place quite early in the examination period (on 12th and 15th January, respectively) so I should be able to get them corrected in time to have a break for some research before teaching resumes at the start of February.
#complexAnalysis #engineeringMathematics #genai #generativeAi #mathematics #maynoothUniversity