I don’t have a Physics lab every week, although my schedule indicates that.
Every other week I have a tutorial instead, where we solve problems in groups. The tutorial is run by two TAs (teaching assistants.) One of them has a British accent and er… I don’t talk to him much. He’s rather intimidating. The other does not have a British accent. I like him better. He’s not as cold and actually engages us in conversation about stuff not related to Physics. :dorkygrin:
Without fail, the latter TA will find something interesting in or near my pencil box every two weeks.
Week #1: A set of gel pens marketed as “Smellies.” Despite the name, they actually have a pleasant odor when you write with them. When you sniff them directly, as my TA did, they smell like “ink. Now I understand. Gullible first-years buy these and spend class sniffing them, reducing their performance in Physics.”
Week #2: My English text. “You know, I got through English by never reading the book. I’d listen to what others had to say about a character, and then I’d argue the exact opposite. Finally, the teacher asked me what I thought of so-and-so, and I replied, ‘Well, I thought he didn’t really belong.’ Then he said, ‘That’s not even a character in the novel.’ ‘See?’ I said. ‘He didn’t belong!'”
Week #3: My gel pens, again. “Don’t you find that they run out really quickly? I went through a pen in two classes. I bought a set of gel pens once… accidentally. Yeah, imagine doing quantum physics in sparkly gel pen.”
Week #4: Two things this week, actually. First, my clicker. He was incredulous that these things were actually used in Physics classes. “… Physics isn’t multiple choice, pick the best answer, you know. There are many different approaches to a problem but only one right answer.” It turned out that a buddy of his had to try to write scripts to accomodate the possibility of two correct answers. *shudder* Secondly, I was cramming for a Chemistry midterm last week, and I’d scribbled all the equations I needed to know on a Post-it note. “This is chemistry? These are phyiscs equations!” “Oh, that’s because chemistry is physics and it’s all really really mixed up…” I explained, rather unhelpfully. “See, everything comes from physics. Except biology. That’s an observational science… if physicists had stumbled upon Galapagos, they would have chucked the finches into a closed system and figured out the collision rate.”
Winson Says: