First day of teaching. It was utterly exhausting. I almost thought it was a mistake to schedule all of my classes consecutively, but this is the year that I must learn to teach faster and talk less nonsense in class. On the hand, it is important to “be yourself” when teaching and by this time I know that I really have no choice. My style is “fixed” to some extent and it will take a major effort to change it dramatically. On the hand, I would like to improve it in small ways.
But perhaps more than anything else, this is the last year (I hope) that I need to prepare any of my courses. Software Engineering has now somewhat converged to a decent course with a good set of lecture notes and I hope that I can reuse the current incarnation for a few more years. My Model Checking is a little more in flux, but if this year’s version works, I’ll keep it as it is. The Computer Graphics course is the one I would like to get rid of most, but no-one else wants it. I like the subject, but this is the first graphics course our students take, so I’m teaching the very basics and it is not all that exciting.
My Honours classes are small, but the SE bunch is a decent size, about 35 students. They seem like a lively group, which is a good thing. I think today’s first lecture went OK, despite the fact that I spent far too much time on the preliminaries and administrative details. However, they are important, and I’m not too disappointed.
OK, enough teaching shop talk. I’ll try to not complain about my teaching too much from now on, except when it comes to general insights. And I’ll also try to avoid the weather, except to note that we are having a wonderful sun-shiny week. Other people tend to disagree, but I think we’ve had quite a dry winter until now. In recent years the start of spring has shifted to early October, and summer will really only start December. But this seems to be the summeriest winter I can recall in a long time.
One more note: Willem and Brink are back from one-week trips to conferences and both are really fired up about research, as far as I can tell. This is good news for me and I’m hoping they’ll “drive” me to do some new research as well. Unfortunately, this buzz usually wears off in a couple of weeks. And they’re perhaps more inured to the effects of conferences than I am. [Potentially libelous comments about another, local conference I have to attend in September deleted.]