h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Having spent three years demonstrating physics experiments I can safely state, the demonstrators have no clue what is going on. They are proably hungover and are trying to run an experiment at the other end of the building at the same time. Be nice to them, please.

LOL I in one of my labs that was blatently obviously the case. The demonstrator had had an hour, & looked at the experiment which she understood only in the room. Not any of the other ones, just the one she didn't need to...
& anything in that lab which worked was coincidence.

But I did have one demonstrator who had, apparently, spent his entire life demonstrating in that room. And he just had to look at the experiment to make it work.

Lucky Sod. We were told, and it did appear to hold true, that no matter how many years you had spent on an experiment and no matter how many problems you had found and solved, a student can still bugger it up in ways unimaginably difficult to fathom. Or indeed, so stupidly simple it takes you hours to find. I did have the advantage of doing Honours labs, where (almost) all the students were actually interested, which was nice.

We were all like "I just don't want to be here! its too early in the morning! no!"

That demonstrator was & is really scary. He had the other demonstrator in awe of him. My partner & I and the other demonstrator'd spent ages trying to calibrate this wretched CCD. He just had to touch a couple of things & it worked. We asked him what he'd done. He said we must've had something set up wrong.... ...but we didn't. We were treating our lab scripts as our Bibles.

Ahhh, you want to be careful with those lab scripts. There is quite a bit of research into teaching methods at Glasgow, and one thing they did was to fiddle with a Vet lab script so that the bottom of the page read "Heat solution for half an hour". Upon turning the page over it read "Meanwhile ... " Not one single student turned there sheet over before the half hour was up
While they may have invented the teaching lab, Glasgow are now studying better ways of doing it. There is even a little group that wants to do away with lectures! Where will it end!!!

Another thought. One of the experiments I taught was sufficiently sensitive that I could ruin someones results by stepping heavily on the floor as I went past. Great fun if someone annoyed me that was.

Oooh thats evil....

& no lectures... that would cut down on my sleeping time

These same people studying labs look at lectures. They note points where students attention wanders from the speaker and graph it. As you might expect, if the speaker is dull people wander more than if he is interesting. But, even the best speaker cannot keep your attention for a full hour. As, such, the people doing the research can now tell who the speaker was simply by looking at the graphs!

Gosh, I am full of useless knowledge on this stuff!

Eeek thats scary...

I like astronomy lectures when the lecturer decides to show you lots of slides. Nice and relaxing....
Does attention wander even if the students have to copy stuff off of the blackboard?

Yep. I think it is an average of two to three times in an hour lecture. If you are doing a video lecture or somethng like that the numbers go up, no matter how good the lecturer is. Tutorials are the way of the future, just as soon as they have hired another zillion staff members

Many zillions.
The real killer in my experience is printed lecture notes. In my classical mechanics course the lecturer went through OHPs at a rate of knots, and there wasn't time to understand it in the lecture. I just went to get the corrections to the error strewn lecture notes. I did well, though, I got through Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Women in Love, Wuthering Heights...

I succesfully manage to answer a question in my finals, based on th information supplied in some printed lecture notes I had received two weeks previously. This was even more impresive, as the subject had been covered in half a paragraph of my own notes, taken in the last lecture I ever had! Luckily the question was on The Hot Big Bang model, rather than the other half of the paragraph, Einstein's four dimensional tensor calculations of gravity, which was nice.

We had a lab script which said very clearly "put this wire in this hole and that wire in that one."

Well, it didn't work and it didn't seem logical to us, so we changed it and it worked.

The demonstrator came over and told us off for having them the wrong way round and made us change it.

Well, we couldn't get it to work, so we put our hands up and waited... and waited... and he came back and actually muttered "silly girls" under his breath and his whole attitude was really sexist... but he couldn't get it to work, so he called over the head of lab...

Who switched the wires back to the way we had done and told the demonstrator to pay attention to the demonstrator's notices in future.

After a few more sexist comments from that demonstrator, we and 4 other girls officially complained about him.