The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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5:07pm on Tuesday, 8th October, 2013:
Anecdote
I did my first two lectures of the 2013/14 academic year today. Essex University has a 10-week teaching term system, which is quite cushy really; it means we don't start lectures until October.
Only two thirds of the students supposed to be at the 9am lecture were there, but there were traffic problems in Colchester so that might explain it. Then again, the fact it was 9am might explain it. The other lecture was well-attended but I don't know how many students were supposed to be there so can't say how many weren't.
The rooms in which the lectures took place are not among my favourites.
5B.111A is in a place which years ago was the "light well", an open space with two floors of empty space above it leading to the roof. It was filled in and converted into teaching rooms over a decade ago, when teaching space was short. The result is a room with no windows that gets very hot.
4.311 isn't so bad, in that it does have windows, but the equipment there is not in good condition. The controller for the screen was dangling from its own cord, having been ripped out of the wall by someone or something. There was a coffee cup next to the projector console that had coffee in it with several weeks' growth of mould on its surface. Some of this had been spilled onto the console and looked as if it was developing its own ecosystem. This room also got very hot, but I've no clue as to why.
I eventually decided to go with full-world access to the "listen again" lecture recordings, on the basis that it's not fair to the students who do go to the lectures not to have access to those recordings, and I probably don't want the kind of student who bunks off lectures to be there disrupting them anyway. This means that if you can find the recordings, you can hear me calling other universities "bastards" for also teaching Lua and in so doing making it harder for Essex students to get jobs programming it...
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Copyright © 2013 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).