Today my teaching duties restart once more - this semester I’ll only be teaching Classical Thermodynamics for the Mathematics BSc. Last year’s course was very successful, and I hope to be able to replicate the success this year. Since I will be teaching mathematicians, for today’s first lecture I decided to set the record straight and openly admit that, yes, we physicists do simplify differentials and treat them as fractions. Hopefully this helped break the ice! Once more, all my teaching material will be made publicly available, while being regularly updated, on the English and Italian versions of my teaching page.
Teaching feedback
I just received the feedback from students of the courses I delivered last semester (General Physics I part 2 and Advanced Topics in Theoretical Physics). The feedback was excellent, with a satisfaction index of 100%! Given the amount of work I put into preparing the courses, and the enthuasism I tried to instill, I was really happy to read the students’ comments, especially for the Advanced Topics in Theoretical Physics aka Cosmology course (see below) - the students really appeared to appreciate my efforts to always help them not lose sight of the big picture, even when the latter risked being obscured by the complexity of the calculations (especially when it came to deriving the Boltzmann equations). I do indeed find it important (not only in my work but also in my research) to, so to say, “not lose sight of the forest for the trees”. I found the feedback really rewarding, and the comments will motivate me to do even better in the coming semesters!
Teaching ends today (for now)
Today marks the end of the teaching period, which will restart in September. Now of course it’s time for exams (already the coming Monday)! While it was truly nice to be able interact with many bright young minds, teaching two and a half courses was also particularly heavy, I’m not gonna lie, so I really look forward to a couple of months where I will be able to mostly focus on research. So, hopefully, several new papers should come out in the next months. Stay tuned!
Teaching starts today!
Today marks the start of the new semester, and with it of my teaching duties. I have a particularly heavy teaching load this semester (as a result of my having started mid-semester in October, which implied I obviously could not teach classes in the previous semester), where I’ll be lecturing General Physics I part 2 (basically Classical Thermodynamics, roughly following Zemansky) for the Mathematics BSc, Advanced Topics in Theoretical Physics (which, despite the cryptic name, is an advanced course in Modern Cosmology, which will more or less cover Chapters 1-8 of Dodelson) for the Physics MSc, as well as within the Percorso di Approfondimento in Fisica (PAF), a supplement lecture series for the Physics BSc aimed towards particularly capable and motivated students. Needless to say, I already know that throughout the semester research will proceed on a very low gear in the best of cases (and I hope my collaborators won’t hate me for this! 😝). However, despite the overall heavy load, I really look forward to teaching and interacting with bright young minds! As an aside, all my teaching material (notes, slides, exams, solutions, and so on) will be available, while being regularly updated, on the English and Italian versions of my teaching page.
