Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

After several weeks (or has it been a month already?) of not lecturing fully for the entirety of the period, I got back to it today. In fact, in my first class, I was still talking while the bell was ringing in the background. Of course, that was partly because I was trying to make the first topic stretch as far as possible, that when I couldn’t sustain it, and it was too early to dismiss them, I had to launch into the second topic.

But I realized what I missed about full-time lecturing: the adlibs that get an immediate reaction. Well, I’m going to have at least one more period of that next meeting, when I finish the topics I started today.

Another idea I have for one of the two remaining lecture sessions is to revisit the survey I had them answer at the start of the term, about astronomy misconceptions, like the fact that you can’t pay to have a star named after your girlfriend.

On another front, I was the panelist for another thesis proposal defense today. The adviser was the most prolific one of our department, who has had students accompany him to the national conferences to present their papers. And since their undergraduate theses are all part of his doctoral thesis, I’ve seen him really pushed the students noses into the grindstone in terms of editing their documents.

So it was a little surprising to see this student’s paper so vague and sloppy. The title didn’t specify that she was using just one technique to fabricate the superconductors out of all the ones listed. The scope, delimitation and methodology only specified “above and below the melting point” instead of giving the exact temperatures. Lastly, only of her references had a date a location. As far as we were concerned, the related researches she mentioned could have been done ten years ago, and someplace where the materials were more accessible.

Anyway, we gave her our comments and expect her revised paper next week.