It's the last working day of September, and the last day of week 1 of our semester. I've now given my first classes in the Special Relativity module that I have been teaching in one form or other since 2006. I keep begging to be able to give it up and to teach something else, as part of the enjoyment of teaching is to keep learning new things myself, but so far my continuing duties have been required. It's not to say that I don't enjoy teaching Special Relativity. It's even led to a fun publication when a keen student enjoyed the course so much that he wanted to do his bachelor's final year project on the topic, and we managed to do something publishable.
On the other hand, the other module I usually teach this semester, Modern Computational Techniques, is a course I had been teaching (under different guises) since 2004, and I am glad that I have managed to move on from that. That module is discontinued, though some of the mateial lives on in a course combining advanced computational and experimental methods, on which I still teach. Part of this new module is an optional project on quantum computing, which I am looking after. That's pretty exciting for me, and I'm looking forward to the first subset of students in the class embarking on that project with me and my PhD student Lance next week.
In non-physics news, it's also the start of the new season of the Quiz League of London, and I'm pleased to have been involved in our team's first match, which we won reasonably comfortably.
For a picture to accompany this post, I looked at my camera roll for this week. Probably the most appropriate is the room in which my 40 students were supposed to come for my Special Relativity Lecture. I'm glad I went a couple of days before to check it out, as there is was definitely not room for 40 students in there. I managed to get the class moved to a room with capacity, even if not all students attended.
