Monday is my busiest day. Ethics online from 8am to midday. Then taking Scully out for a quick walk, before returning home to shower and change for the afternoon’s tutorial session at the University. I take Scully to my wife’s work and hop on the train, and arrive just in time to grab some salted caramel cookies to sustain me during the session.
The project planning report was in for each team and I skimmed through all of the ones I’m assigned to mark, so I could talk to the students and give them any advice for the experimental work they are planning on doing in the next two weeks. A few of the teams look in control but some were clearly floundering a little, and I spent time with a couple of the teams going over their experiment plans, and the statistical methods they should be using. I forget sometimes that this is a first year course, so the students are less than a year out of high school. I talk to them about Fourier transforms and stuff and then when they look at me blankly I realise they don’t even know what those are.
There was another odd issue which popped up. One student was obviously a native French speaker, and using French software on their laptop. They were exporting data from Excel in CSV format and trying to import into Matlab. But the numbers were coming across all wrong. After scratching my head for a minute I realised it’s because French Excel exports decimal numbers with commas instead of decimal points (and uses semicolons instead of commas to separate the fields, but Matlab handled that okay).
Next Monday is the last tutorial session, and the final project report is due on Friday next week. Then I’m free again on Monday afternoons! Then in semester two I’ll be doing the Image Processing course again on Thursday evenings.
New content today:
I was astonished a few months ago, when an adjunct professor of math (at a community college) didn’t know what a Fourier transform was. I mean, I only did two years of my physics major before switching to zoology, and I knew.
Wow… I don’t expect students barely 6 months out of high school to know Fourier transforms, but that professor should!