I haven’t written much for this blog for a while now. The reason is that I had some serious lecturing duties this semester, which runs for 12 weeks until next week. If you are an academic in a university, you almost certainly have to do a fair bit of teaching. So I thought it might be appropriate to give you a flavour of what that means in practice (just in case you were considering an academic career yourself).

Obi-Wan Klaasnobi

This semester, I teach an introductory astronomy course for first-year students from all over the university although most of these students are from physics and chemistry. The middle third of it (about planets), I have taught for the past 10 years. This year, I took over the first and third parts as well. On the face of it, it does not sound like a lot: two unique lectures a week (repeated once) for total of 24 lectures (48 including the repeats). However, this does not mean that I just spend 48 hours teaching this course.

For the middle bit, I have well-developed slides and handouts. They are tweaked from year to year: the planets do not change but NASA and ESA keep on sending probes to Mars, Saturn, etc. so you have to keep on changing the story a bit. Still, I probably spend about an hour preparing for each of those planet lectures.

The new bits are a different story though. I took over PowerPoint slides from some other guys. Unfortunately, they haven’t read Ad’s book. I may disagree with Ad on some details but he is of course correct about clear presentation, content being more important than flashy formatting, etc. If I see one more PowerPoint slide with a dozen transitioned bits of text flying in and out, I’m going to scream!! By the way, there was a great preponderance of centred text, which – I have to admit – is hideous in most cases. Worst of all, the slides I inherited had few pictures, rotten animations, completely rubbish Microsoft-Office-generated diagrams, and content that was years behind (for example, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 – not exactly hot stuff).

The result was that I spent approximately 3 days of preparation for each hour of lecturing; that’s about 48 full days of work. The result was 318 new slides (in Keynote, basically like PowerPoint) using 14 movies (downloaded from various websites), 42 newly drawn diagrams (mostly in Illustrator), and ~100 astronomy photos. Some parts of the course were easy but some bits I had to read up on. Dark energy? Big Bang nucleosynthesis? Chandrasakhar limit? I had no clue before this.

Next year will be a lot easier. The slides will largely stay the same but I may find time to produce some proper handouts with a condensed version of the slides. Tweaking the content will still take time but it will get easier as the years progress until, in about ten years time, it will take an hour of preparation per hour of lecturing again.

Maybe, I’m spending too much time on this sort of stuff but even if you do a half-hearted job, teaching still takes an awful lot of your time. It typically has no positive impact on your research (quite to the contrary as all this time could have been used to write papers and proposals). On the other hand, it is nice if the students appreciate it. It is nice to make 150 students laugh about a silly little joke. And they gave me a nice nickname: Obi-Wan Klaasnobi. I feel the force is strong in you too…

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