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livThis has been rather a full week, with six half-day practicals, a two-day work shop, a concert and leading a service.
I am finding running practical classes both harder work and less rewarding than leading seminars. It's partly that the students seem to switch their brains off completely when they enter the lab; they have the expectation that they should be following a step-by-step recipe. This means repeating the same rather elementary explanations over and over to about 15 different groups. Space constraints mean that each class has to be repeated three times, which doesn't help, and I ended up volunteering for two of them in the same week, so pretty much all day Monday, Tuesday and Friday. The other issue is that one of the first year sets have developed a rather bad dynamic and have got into the habit of responding to instructions with "why should I?" and the like, which meant that the tutors running the class got quite stressed, and that spilled over into the other sessions.
On the positive side, I spent the remaining two days to a workshop about how to be "an effective researcher". I was hoping for practical guidance on starting up a new research group, but instead got a lot of general effectiveness training, things like communication skills and time management. It was actually rather good, with a group of 9 who were all early career academics, and a leader who herself spent many years on the academic track before becoming a trainer instead. So it was pitched for intelligent and committed people, which makes a lot of difference. In some ways the best thing about it was watching her teaching technique, because she did a really good job of presenting the information in varied ways, and encouraging the group to discover things for ourselves and share ideas. That meant that it was very much the opportunity I was hoping for to meet some colleagues. Also quite a lot of fun; one of the activities involved making a time machine
out of cardboard boxes, something I haven't done in at least 25 years, but it also triggered useful discussion as well as being silly so I never felt I was wasting my time with pointless games when I wanted to be learning.
The highlight of the week was attending a concert with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mathcathy. I picked up a leaflet from the university music society, and this event caught my eye, so I invited Cathy to join me for it. It was a group called Red Priest, advertised as doing an original take on early music. When they came onstage wearing Dracula-style cloaks with hoods and face-obscuring masks, I feared it might be a bit gimmicky, but actually they centred the music while having fun and deviating from the usual chamber music style. They were great performers and really drew the audience into enjoying both their antics and the music. So they had mock fights to represent duelling musical themes, or ended a dramatic piece by pointing their bows and recorder at the audience like drawn weapons, or at one point the cellist picked up her instrument and strummed it like a rock guitar, but 95% of the time was spent actually playing music that you could concentrate on. In order to manage this very dramatic presentation, they played everything by heart, particularly impressive with some extremely complex and rapid runs of notes.
The other thing I really liked was that they were interested in Baroque music as such, exploring the musical developments of that particular period, rather than the more usual simply lumping Baroque music together with either early music or generic classical. They did a mixture of less well known works by extremely famous composers like Bach, Corelli and eponymously Vivaldi, with less famous composers who were historically important. The only downside was that the leader was a competent but less than brilliant recorder player, and recorders are just annoying squeaky instruments when played by anyone less than an absolute genius.
And I rounded off the week by leading the Friday night service in the little dinky shul. The elderly man who essentially runs the community was away doing AJEX stuff in honour of Remembrance Day. When he was fretting that he needed someone to take the service in his absence, I volunteered, and although he was a little surprised he welcomed the offer. In the event the weather was utterly foul, and we didn't quite make the necessary quorum, but those who did attend seemed delighted with my efforts. This in spite of the fact that I am somewhat less experienced at leading Orthodox style services, and my horrible lack of musical ability. Certainly nobody so much as raised an eyebrow at having a woman lead the prayers; I know they have used women before faute de mieux, so I wasn't too worried about that. (Legally it actually doesn't matter since we had fewer than the requisite ten to make a proper communal service, but this kind of thing is often much more emotional than legal.)
Anyway, I was pretty tired by the end of all that, so I'm enjoying a quiet weekend hanging out at the library and cooking and tidying. And parents are due any minute, as they are stopping off en route to Liverpool.
I am finding running practical classes both harder work and less rewarding than leading seminars. It's partly that the students seem to switch their brains off completely when they enter the lab; they have the expectation that they should be following a step-by-step recipe. This means repeating the same rather elementary explanations over and over to about 15 different groups. Space constraints mean that each class has to be repeated three times, which doesn't help, and I ended up volunteering for two of them in the same week, so pretty much all day Monday, Tuesday and Friday. The other issue is that one of the first year sets have developed a rather bad dynamic and have got into the habit of responding to instructions with "why should I?" and the like, which meant that the tutors running the class got quite stressed, and that spilled over into the other sessions.
On the positive side, I spent the remaining two days to a workshop about how to be "an effective researcher". I was hoping for practical guidance on starting up a new research group, but instead got a lot of general effectiveness training, things like communication skills and time management. It was actually rather good, with a group of 9 who were all early career academics, and a leader who herself spent many years on the academic track before becoming a trainer instead. So it was pitched for intelligent and committed people, which makes a lot of difference. In some ways the best thing about it was watching her teaching technique, because she did a really good job of presenting the information in varied ways, and encouraging the group to discover things for ourselves and share ideas. That meant that it was very much the opportunity I was hoping for to meet some colleagues. Also quite a lot of fun; one of the activities involved making a time machine
out of cardboard boxes, something I haven't done in at least 25 years, but it also triggered useful discussion as well as being silly so I never felt I was wasting my time with pointless games when I wanted to be learning.The highlight of the week was attending a concert with
mathcathy. I picked up a leaflet from the university music society, and this event caught my eye, so I invited Cathy to join me for it. It was a group called Red Priest, advertised as doing an original take on early music. When they came onstage wearing Dracula-style cloaks with hoods and face-obscuring masks, I feared it might be a bit gimmicky, but actually they centred the music while having fun and deviating from the usual chamber music style. They were great performers and really drew the audience into enjoying both their antics and the music. So they had mock fights to represent duelling musical themes, or ended a dramatic piece by pointing their bows and recorder at the audience like drawn weapons, or at one point the cellist picked up her instrument and strummed it like a rock guitar, but 95% of the time was spent actually playing music that you could concentrate on. In order to manage this very dramatic presentation, they played everything by heart, particularly impressive with some extremely complex and rapid runs of notes.The other thing I really liked was that they were interested in Baroque music as such, exploring the musical developments of that particular period, rather than the more usual simply lumping Baroque music together with either early music or generic classical. They did a mixture of less well known works by extremely famous composers like Bach, Corelli and eponymously Vivaldi, with less famous composers who were historically important. The only downside was that the leader was a competent but less than brilliant recorder player, and recorders are just annoying squeaky instruments when played by anyone less than an absolute genius.
And I rounded off the week by leading the Friday night service in the little dinky shul. The elderly man who essentially runs the community was away doing AJEX stuff in honour of Remembrance Day. When he was fretting that he needed someone to take the service in his absence, I volunteered, and although he was a little surprised he welcomed the offer. In the event the weather was utterly foul, and we didn't quite make the necessary quorum, but those who did attend seemed delighted with my efforts. This in spite of the fact that I am somewhat less experienced at leading Orthodox style services, and my horrible lack of musical ability. Certainly nobody so much as raised an eyebrow at having a woman lead the prayers; I know they have used women before faute de mieux, so I wasn't too worried about that. (Legally it actually doesn't matter since we had fewer than the requisite ten to make a proper communal service, but this kind of thing is often much more emotional than legal.)
Anyway, I was pretty tired by the end of all that, so I'm enjoying a quiet weekend hanging out at the library and cooking and tidying. And parents are due any minute, as they are stopping off en route to Liverpool.
