Practice, Practice, Practice: Getting that Talk Right

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Athene Donald

As my last post noted, my mind is inclined to go for a walk during seminars if I’m not careful. Recently these wanderings provoked me to consider all the pitfalls of seminar-giving – by young and old alike. Experience doesn’t necessarily bring wisdom and the best-laid plans can go astray for all kinds of reasons. Nevertheless, the advice to those just beginning to learn the art of giving talks must start with the words ‘practice, practice, practice’ – go through your talk as many times as it takes to feel comfortable. It won’t cure all the problems, or cause the fear to evaporate, but winging it as a novice is never a wise tactic. Indeed, it has to be questioned if winging it is ever a wise tactic but with experience at least comes some modicum of knowing how to pick yourself up when you’ve lost your own train of thought or found the slides weren’t exactly as you’d thought in either order or content.

Here I list some headings of danger areas that can affect anyone, but particularly the inexperienced.

1 Pronunciation

One aspect of practice is to make sure you can actually pronounce the words you are familiar with from reading. It is surprising how even standard English words can suddenly become a minefield. My own bête noire is phenomenology; long, long ago I had a student who always tripped over the word anisotropy – which was very unfortunate given that the word was fundamental to his field of research. But practice may help, though in my case it doesn’t seem to have cured the problem reliably, and at least you needn’t be caught unawares. This also applies to the case of famous authors whose work you want to quote, but whose nationality may be very different from your own with correspondingly unfamiliar syllables in their names.

2 Nerves

Nerves can afflict anyone and probably will. Making sure you have the first sentence or two of your presentation clearly mentally organised in advance may help. But if you are shaking, the use of a laser pointer can be a real give away, particularly if the screen is large and every nervous twitch/shake gets magnified many times for everyone to see. My solution to this is to hold my wrist with my other hand. It has an excellent stabilising effect without being particularly noticeable. Of course, that presupposes that you’ve found the laser pointer: it’s a good idea to try to locate that in advance.

3 Animation

When powerpoint presentations first became common, it was not infrequent to see every slide being animated in extreme ways, with phrases or figures dashing in from all directions in a way that was bewildering or irritating (or both). Mercifully, that sort of animation has calmed down and what is left is usually helpful or at least not distracting. But there is another kind of animation that matters too, the animation of the speaker. You can be perfectly audible but speak in a dull monotone, that doesn’t feel as if you’re projecting or wanting to engage with the audience. In this case it is the lack of animation which is intensely irritating. Inaudibility is always unforgiveable, but it ought also to be unnecessary since any large room/lecture hall should be provided with the necessary microphones. (It is just unfortunate that smart women’s clothes frequently don’t come equipped with pockets in which to seat the mike – and attaching the base unit to one’s waistband can so often end up being undignified, as experience tells me.)

4 Fonts and Colours

When it comes to colour schemes, there are many that work – and even more that don’t. Be aware that a significant number of people are red/green colour blind and eschew pairing those particular colours. The important thing is that your slides are visible, and on figures make sure that different colours are not merely subtly different and hence indistinguishable. I am no fan of fancy fonts, although I can’t get very worked up about the sans serif arguments. But what is undoubtedly necessary is that the size of the font is adequate. Think about this before attempting to squeeze too much information onto a single slide. If you want lots of words to help you remember what you’re trying to say, write yourself notes; the audience doesn’t need to be bombarded with anything other than the salient facts. Which leads me to a common and tiresome phrase….

5 …I know this is a busy slide…

Does it need to be? Do you really need 26 tiny diagrams that no one can see, a table with a dozen columns containing invisible numbers or a bar chart with so much data on it it’s incomprehensible? I think the answer to all those questions is no. If you have a lot of data there are probably simpler ways of representing it, plus a reference to the paper/thesis/report where the full data can be found. What message are you trying to get across that needs all the data to back it up? Typically the audience will not be experts in whatever is your field, although you should always try to establish in advance the likely make-up of the audience. A generalist audience is likely just to want to get the gist of your arguments. Save the detail for group meetings with collaborators, who can appreciate it properly.

6 Timing

Once upon a time, when I was young, inexperienced and overenthusiastic about just how wonderfully interesting my results were, I gave a seminar that lasted an hour and a half at a major research lab. I look back on this episode with shame. Someone should have stopped me after an hour, or at most a few minutes past the hour. If a seminar is scheduled for an hour, that’s the maximum it should last (although I appreciate there are disciplines where longer talks are the norm, that certainly isn’t the case in my field). This is one place where practice really does help, because you can see how long those slides you’ve prepared are likely to take to present. A dry run time isn’t always accurate, for reasons ranging from nerves making you talk fast (or slow) to the talk provoking so many questions as you go along that timing goes out of the window. But, you ought to know roughly how long your material will take to present and, if that vital practice run-through shows you that the material you have is either inadequately short or tediously long, you have a chance to do something about it before inflicting a mismanaged talk on your audience. I wish someone had given me that advice all those years ago to save my embarrassment.

7 Questions

Handling questions improves with practice. Experience will teach you how not to look totally discomfited or dumbfounded by some obvious objection to your analysis you’d failed to think of in advance (though a good supervisor should protect you from this failing by taking you through potential pitfalls); experience will also tell you how to handle the person who has spotted the flaw in your arguments that you did know about but hoped no one would latch on to.  In my experience the worst questions to deals with are the ones you don’t really understand and you cannot tell if the questioner has completely missed the point of the entire seminar, has some bee in their bonnet that you don’t know about or genuinely has some deep concern that you’ve failed to appreciate. Sometimes they are simply asking the question in imperfect English quietly from the back of a large lecture theatre, which makes it difficult to understand however hard you try. All these situations are very tricky but often the best solution is to suggest you discuss it all later over the tea break. This is also the case if some long-running argument is dug up again.

9 Eye Contact

The speaker who stares at their shoes or only looks at the screen is not going to engage the audience. I’m not proposing that you should make eye contact with any specific individual in the audience (unless you’ve agreed this tactic with a friend), but I do think you should look in the general direction of the audience. I find looking at the back wall works quite well, so you don’t have to stare at anyone in particular, but you might fool the entire audience into thinking you’re looking at someone else as long as you look at an appropriate height. You just want to look as if the audience actually matters to you; you may even want to gauge whether they’re nodding and smiling at your jokes. But staring at the floor because you’re frightened you might see someone dozing off or frowning will only make them more likely to do so.

10 Know your slides

Above all, make sure you are familiar with your material. To be honest, I think this is more of a problem for the experienced speaker than the novice, someone who has given a similar talk before, perhaps many times and simply cannot remember which particular slides are included in this particular version. You may think you’ve got that clever schematic to explain a tricky point later, only to find that you’d ditched it for the sake of time and you end up looking wrong-footed if not actually stupid. Even worse is when you find you’ve inserted a slide, perhaps borrowed from a colleague or nicked from the web, that you suddenly can’t remember anything about. Perhaps it uses a technique you can’t explain, or you’ve forgotten the details of the sample. If you get caught out like that all you can do is laugh it off, but it doesn’t look very professional.

There are other pitfalls it is hard to prepare for.  GMP has recently published a post on her blog  where she discusses problems with lecture theatre lay-out (where should you stand relative to screen and computer?) and the dangers of having to speak into a fixed mike if you like to perambulate. These are things it’s very hard to prepare for, because you won’t know the set-up till you arrive and they are concerns I share.  All you can hope is that if you’ve got these 10 potential disaster areas happily sorted, you will have energy and confidence left to cope with any remaining but unknown problems that may turn up.

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Feeling Feverish

Posted on April 13, 2013 by Athene Donald

Last week I was hit by some nebulous virus (I assume) that left me feverish and under the weather without actually confining me to bed. My brain turned to mush and even answering simple emails felt a challenge, a situation rendered more serious by the fact I’d just come back from a week away from my computer so the email mountain was particularly large.  OK, to be more honest, the email mountain had been building up steadily since around the start of March when my diary had got severely overfull due to a plethora of London meetings and a trip to Brussels. The pressure of knowing that there was a horrendously large number of urgent emails, carefully colour coded in my Inbox to indicate their relative criticality, did nothing to improve the functioning of my brain as I stared at my laptop screen.

However, apologising for the dilatoriness of my responses to colleagues (or possibly apologising for the woolliness and unhelpfulness in any responses I did make) is not the point of this post. What interested me was the way my brain’s behaviour took on a life of its own. Normally I have enough self-control to mean that when I start writing a reply to an email I can usually manage to finish it and send it off. Not so last week. I would start reading an email and consider what I wanted to say in response, but before I’d managed to put that down in black and white my brain would go off at a tangent. I would find myself hunting out another email, or checking what I’d said to someone else 6 months ago on something vaguely relevant; maybe I’d even start chasing up some reference on the web. Half an hour later the original email was still unanswered and I’d forgotten what it was I wanted to say. I’d like to think this was a temporary condition brought on by my body temperature having crept up a degree or two, nothing drastic, just enough to make any sort of efficiency go out of the window.

It was a strange feeling. Although I am as capable of wasting time on the web as anyone, usually I am also able to concentrate if I try hard enough. In the state I was in, that was hopeless. My brain was just not going to play ball for a few days. Usually, one takes one’s brain for granted, familiar with the way of maintaining a balance and getting what one wants out of it. The only other times I am aware of my brain circuitry going astray is after a (classic) migraine attack. Although I find sumatriptan almost a wonder-drug in stopping the pain and nausea of the episode itself if I swallow it fast enough as the aura first strikes, I still get left with the after-effects once the headache itself has stopped. This, apparently, is called the postdrome and during this stage it is as if I can mentally visualise all those electrical signals trying to course through my brain and getting stopped at some unexpected barrier (maybe genuinely a synapse, I’ve no idea, I can only discuss what it feels like from inside). So, when trying to solve some problem I feel as if I can take a solution so far and then wham, I hit a brick wall, even though I know when fully fit that wall would not be there. This is particularly trying when attempting to teach familiar stuff: you know you know the answer but there’s no way you can retrieve it. You can feel the whirrings of the cogs in the brain and they are going nowhere. It is bizarre to know that your brain has simply gone on strike, although outwardly all is well. I appreciate that neuroscientists are probably appalled by what I’m writing but since as far as I understand it, the underlying biochemical cause of migraines remains a mystery, I guess I’m entitled to discuss it in non-scientific terms, just in terms of the symptoms I experience.

But back to the state of fever. What I realised when my brain was not behaving as I expected it to was the interesting light this cast on creativity. I wasn’t able to be dutiful and painstaking, but the flights of fancy and the way my thoughts darted about if I gave them free rein, allowed me to make connections my more disciplined brain would probably not have allowed. In full health, when is one at one’s most creative? In my experience it is not necessarily when one is fully concentrating on a task in hand but (inconveniently) as you drift off to sleep – and then wake up completely, fully alert as you try to capture that great thought; or (a particular favourite of mine) when sitting through a boring seminar. At times like that you are not consciously thinking about the seminar material, but you are also not being distracted by the boringly domestic (what should I cook for supper?), the frustratingly political (Osborne said what?) or the resolutely practical (if I catch the 0815 train I should arrive in time). So the mind seems to be receptive to random forays into interesting niches, bringing different familiar facts together in new ways. The single real Eureka moment I can remember in my whole research career certainly occurred in that way. There I was, sitting through a student seminar at a time when I myself was a research fellow, idly sketching some possible curves for the way polymer failure might occur as a function of temperature (written up here) when suddenly I realised how my collection of data made sense. But even without shouting Eureka, one can be productive by not concentrating– at least some of the time! – and creativity is such an important part of how we do science.

Creativity is, unfortunately, not necessarily something the average member of the public associates with science. The Blakeian view that ‘Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death’ is too often implicitly accepted, wildly wrong though it is. That view presumes that scientific discovery is a linear process, knowing where it is going to end up when a set of experiments is initiated, allowing no deviation into interesting offshoots and diverging paths. In other words, no room for creativity.

When I appeared on Start the Week a couple of years ago, the producers were, somewhat desperately I thought, trying to find a topic they felt the others round the table could relate to (I had been invited on because they’d spotted I was giving a talk on ‘Alzheimer’s Disease and Yogurt’ – a title which clearly caught their fancy). We agreed on the subject of creativity, as you can hear, but it is something I feel that scientists should bang on about a bit more as being a crucial part of our canon.

Creativity, lateral thinking of the kind provoked by a brain not quite under control, is more commonly associated with the drug-induced writings of someone like Aldous Huxley or the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I am most certainly not advocating the (ab)use of drugs or alcohol in the laboratory, but I do think we should recognize that creativity needs to be loudly reclaimed by scientists. For ourselves we need to work out how best to find that wondrous, passing state, where unexpected ideas can suddenly come from nowhere. However minor they may be, they may adventitiously flash into the mind and make sense of apparently incompatible experimental results or rationalise confusing data. In an ideal world we should be able to find this state, not only without recourse to dangerous substances, but also without being rendered otherwise useless by a virus.

Posted in Communicating Science, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Systematic Errors of Judgement

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Athene Donald

To tie in with International Women’s Day, last month Nature ran a series of articles about the issues still facing women in science and also a podcast with Uta Frith and myself debating some of the issues. The interviewer, Charlotte Stoddart asked me, amongst other things, why I felt unconscious bias was so important that I frequently wrote about it.  My answer was, and is, that it is important for the very reason that it is unconscious, unseen unless taken out of the closet and inspected and so liable to be invidious and pernicious. It is, if you like, a systematic error distorting the very way we judge and are judged – in general to women’s detriment.

Much is made of the practical difficulties of combining a career and a family for women; this is often proposed as the major reason for women leaving science, but I think this is too simplistic. Indeed, academia is probably an easier place – because of the relative freedom we enjoy to work at times that work for us and not just clocking in and out – than some other professions for flexibility around caring responsibilities, for both men and women.  Perpetuating the view that the combination is well-nigh impossible (without exploring, as Ottoline Leyser’s excellent book did, all the different ways women have found actually to manage to do it), is probably only discouraging and disempowering in itself.

But the evidence – gleaned from study after study in the social sciences and related literature, which many Deans of Science or Heads of Science Departments are probably not reading – seems to point to the range of subtle ways in which we, collectively, reach conclusions on others which, all unknowingly, are influenced by gender and stereotypes.  At the bottom of this post I list some of the papers I have come across in the past year or so, not all of which I have comprehensively studied and which I am unqualified to assess in terms of their (social sciences) methodology. I do this for the interested reader in the hopes that this may facilitate their distribution to decision-makers in their institution (some may be behind paywalls depending on institutional subscriptions, so I just link to the abstracts).  In this present post I would like to pick out just one which, like the much-discussed PNAS paper by Moss-Racussin et al, identify some disturbing aspects of the way we all – these failings affect women as well as men – reach conclusions about the work of others and then act them out (I’ll use another post to discuss a very recent paper by Wang et al on an analysis of choices boys and girls make about careers).

Unconscious bias can only be dealt with by making it conscious, by ensuring an instantaneous assessment is backed up by evidence and not just by one’s unthinking gut. Now that overt discrimination is relatively rare and explicit sexism of the sort that says ‘women can’t do this’ rarely annunciated, we need to move on to a situation where the playing field is genuinely level and not just free of gross peaks and troughs. It behoves us all, particularly those in decision-making roles but also those at the receiving end, to consider the myriad and disparate ways in which subtle cues can trigger different reactions according to the gender of the individual under consideration.  This isn’t simply a case of differing ways of reacting to actions, as in the conjugation ‘he is assertive, she is aggressive’ and equivalent pairings. It is also a case of reading between the lines of letters of reference (as I’ve talked about before here and here) or metrics (see this article) and citations (here).

Scientists may like to form judgements based on quantification, but what is emerging from the literature is that our collective reactions invariably seem to imply a systematic disadvantage to women by the use of such metrics, even though it looks like something as gender-neutral as citations may be being studied. The most recent study I came across, entitled The Matilda Effect in Science Communication: An Experiment on Gender Bias in Publication Quality Perceptions and Collaboration Interest  looked at the responses of ‘243 young communication scholars’ when asked to rate some (carefully manipulated) conference abstracts. (The Matilda effect was a phrase coined by Margaret Rossiter 20 years ago to describe the systematic underrecognition of women in science.) The abstracts’ topics and authors were varied to see how the readers reacted and to test a series of hypotheses relying on ‘role congruity’. This theory says that a group (or in this case, an abstract) will be positively evaluated when its characteristics are recognized as aligning with that group’s typical social roles. So a paper written by women about a subject ‘appropriate’ to their gender, such as the effect of media on children (remember this was a project involving science communicators), will be more highly rated than one written by women on an ‘inappropriate’ topic such as political communication.

Their hypotheses were largely borne out; on average the papers written by ‘men’ were perceived as of higher quality than those written by ‘women’, and even more so if stereotypically male topics were being written about. The respondents were also more likely to want to collaborate with the males on stereotypically ‘male’ topics and with the women on those topics associated with women. These trends were the same irrespective of the respondents own gender. The differences in evaluations were not large, but as earlier studies have shown, small effects multiply up over time; this is true of salaries and it is true of less tangible attributes such as recognition or collaboration opportunities.

Somehow we – again I’d stress this seems to apply to both men and women – react differently when we see a name on a piece of paper (let alone when we meet the individual) and are less likely to cite a woman or want to collaborate with them. This reaction is apparently so in-built and rapid that it can happen without even noticing that one has taken in the gender of, say, a paper’s author. I have always believed I don’t look at the names at the top of papers – including those for job applications – and so am unbiased. This latest paper suggests that, whether or not I have taken in a name sufficiently to be able to recall it, I may still be being influenced, so I will have to work harder on this.

I have frequently heard calls for reviewing (eg for grant applications or jobs) to be done blind, i.e. with the name removed. I am not convinced, certainly within a country as small as the UK, that this would be meaningful. You cannot remove details of the field being worked in, the papers cited, or the list of publications attached, so how would an anonymous refereeing process actually work? Surely one should keep names in and remind everyone, constantly, to be on their guard for their own hidden biases? But doing the latter is hard, and cannot be dealt with simply superficially.

To illustrate this let me finish with two linked anecdotes (I know, this isn’t data). The first is from a woman who enquired about how unconscious bias was dealt with at a research council panel. She was told ‘any funny business is stamped on pretty quickly‘. Now, what did the official mean by this? That illegal discrimination was spotted and dealt with, or that anyone who has lurking unconscious bias is hauled over the coals? I think it’s easy to see which was intended. But by way of a specific example of the dangers of bias, of the sort that could turn up at a research council panel, let me cite statements from two recent references I saw (edited for the sake of anonymity) for a male and female applicant of roughly equal standing – the woman happened to be a year further on in her career but had taken time out to have a child – both with stellar credentials.

Woman A

‘ a consistent output of more than a dozen papers per year, despite a period of maternity leave and currently working less than full time; more than £2M of current research funding held as PI….however she is still at a relatively early stage of her career and this makes me uncomfortable about recommending her….’

Man B

‘I should comment on the fact that all but 3 of B’s recent publications do not include Y [his mentor, still in the same department] as a co-author. However for about half of these B appears to be the senior author, and presumably the intellectual driving force behind the work….my overall view is that…he is highly deserving…’

I expect you can see why these two references, in juxtaposition (and with A and B in competition) made me so angry. OK, they weren’t written by the same referee, but in one case the woman is damned with being too early on for serious consideration despite overwhelming evidence for her independence – through grants and papers – explicitly being presented. On the other hand, when it comes to the man – whose independence is being queried with the referee only using weak words like appears and presumably regarding what B has achieved – there seems no doubt in the referee’s mind that B is ‘ready’.

The panel I was on read these comments and dealt with them appropriately in my view, but not all panels may be so sensitive to seeing this manifestation of the Matilda Effect in practice in letters of reference. Is this a form of ‘funny business’ that needs to be stamped on? I think so, but there is no guarantee that it will be. This is why unconscious bias has to be teased out and discussed at every opportunity. Please distribute the (links to the) papers below as widely as possible, and add more to the reading list. It would be nice to think progress could be made.

Reading List (in reverse chronological order; this is bound to be very incomplete, as it relies on papers that have happened to cross my path rather than a systematic search, and only covers the last year or so; additions to this list would be welcome).

 
Not Lack of Ability but More Choice: Individual and Gender Differences in Choice of Careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics by M-T Wang, JS Eccles and S Kenny published online March 18, 2013, doi: 10.1177/0956797612458937 in Psychological Science http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/03/18/0956797612458937.abstract
The Matilda Effect in Science Communication: An Experiment on Gender Bias in Publication Quality Perceptions and Collaboration Interest by S Knobloch-Westerwick, C Glynn and M Huge published online February 6 2013 in Science Communication  http://scx.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/01/24/1075547012472684.abstract
Is publication rate an equal opportunity metric? EZ Cameron, ME Gray and AM White Trends in Ecology and Evolution 28 (2013) 7-8 http://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/abstract/S0169-5347%2812%2900275-3
Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favour male students CA Moss-Racusin, JF Dovidio, VL Brescoll, MJ Graham and J Handelsman PNAS 109 (2012) 16474–16479 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3478626/
‘I wouldn’t say it’s sexism, except that … It’s all these little subtle things’: Healthcare scientists’ accounts of gender in healthcare science laboratories V Bevan and M Learmonth Social Studies of Science 43 (2013) 136-158 http://sss.sagepub.com/content/43/1/136.abstract
Penalties and Premiums: The Impact of Gender, Marriage, and Parenthood, on Faculty Salaries in SEM and non-SEM Fields  K Kelly and L Grant Social Studies of Science 42 (2012) 869-896 http://sss.sagepub.com/content/42/6/869
The academic jungle: ecosystem modelling reveals why women are driven out of research KR O’Brien and KP Hapgood Oikos I21 (2012) 999–1004 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0706.2012.20601.x/abstract

 

Posted in Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Lecturer Spotting

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Athene Donald

The Easter break, relatively short though it may be, offers me an opportunity to introduce another raft of characters from the Athenian University to join my previous lists of Dramatis Personae/ character assassinations. Here I describe variations on the theme of University lecturers, although of course that title is not meant to say anything about an individual’s seniority, merely that their job is to lecture. These now join my other characters, so far encompassing Group Leaders; Professors; University committee members and committee chairs, as well as members of external grant-giving committees.

Dr Energetic

Dr Energetic paces up and down the lecture theatre, their arms waving wildly as they try to put an important point across. Not for the sleepy student who wants to be permitted to doze quietly at the back of the lecture theatre, Dr Energetic will make a quick kip after a hard night’s drinking hard to come by. The advantage of a lecturer such as this is that even boring or turgid subjects may come alive enough to render them intelligible. The disadvantage is that strident tones and histrionic actions may merely irritate not inform.

Dr Inaudible

Dr Inaudible’s offering is very different. They may be the most intelligent person you will ever meet, with a solid grasp of every fact they are trying to convey and a neat turn of phrase to illustrate difficult concepts, but if they are not audible beyond the first two rows in the lecture theatre (and disdain being wired up with a microphone), all this is in vain. Alternatively they may be inaudible because they totally lack confidence in the material they have been assigned to teach and want to be unheard and unremarked. Dr Inaudible needs a stiff talking to by those in charge of teaching, plus subsequent follow-up to check that instructions to use a mike have been taken to heart – as well as a check that their lectures are indeed comprehensible as well as audible.

Dr Dusty

I am of an age to have once been lectured to by a gentleman in a gown. I was exposed to only one such example, I hasten to add, by someone then already close to retirement. The dust – chalk dust- was obvious. For others the dust may be less visible or more metaphorical, but, many lecturers look as if they have been curled up in a corner for many years and are only let out on license for their annual lecturing duties. What they do the rest of the year may be a mystery (in Cambridge of course they can hang out in their college rooms, and may be assiduous in teaching generations of students there). Closely related is Dr Dry-as-Dust, old in character if not in chronological years, probably pernickety and dull, these characters do tend to take their lecturing duties seriously, indeed teaching may be their lifeblood (if not in a style attractive to many) and may be all they wish to do, not least because they aren’t interested in research and possess the leadership and administrative skills of a baby mouse.

Dr Absent-minded

Dr Absent-minded has a reputation for forgetting to turn up to lectures. One such I encountered myself encouraged me to come and find him if he didn’t show up, although that was something I found too embarrassing to contemplate. They may also turn up with the wrong lecture notes (a sin I myself once committed, although the class was amazingly tolerant) or forget to keep an eye on the clock and run over the stated time, despite the audible collective rumblings of the audience’s stomachs. They may be an irritating class of lecturers, but they can also be excellent value. Their failings are in their personal organisation not their teaching ability.

Dr Ultramodern

When the world was using blackboards, Dr Ultramodern had progressed to the overhead projector. As their colleagues caught on with this they were already contemplating the joys of Powerpoint (or should that be ‘joys’?). Dr Ultramodern is never satisfied with the current teaching tools and no doubt will now be dropping in Audioboos to enliven the lecture theatre, relevant or not, and eyeing Google Glasses with interest (will the teaching budget run to them?). That is the trouble: in an ever-changing technical landscape, this particularly lecturer is more interested in showing off the latest technology than mastering the actual content and delivering it with clarity, a failing that can become tedious for the audience.

Dr Famed-as-Charismatic

Word of mouth commentary amongst generations of students is ubiquitous, and a lecturer who starts off as wonderful – enthusiastic, accurate, charming and comprehensible – can notch up a stellar reputation. This can be unfortunate if they start to rest on their laurels, no longer sweating over their lectures to make them first class, but relying on their reputation and a wing and a prayer to get them through, year on year. This is of course particularly disastrous if the teaching admin are so mean as to give them a new course to prepare. What, they have to start from scratch, mug up some new jokes and prepare new slides? Their reputation may take a rapid nosedive after such an unfortunate turn of affairs.

Dr Careless

Dr Careless may have an excellent grasp of their subject, and be hard-working at getting a good course structure with illustrative examples and clear explanations. But where they go wrong is in all those irritating little details – in physics, minus signs incorrectly placed are a particular bugbear; I hated this sort of sloppiness as a student myself, but again I’m ashamed to say it is a sin of which I have not infrequently been guilty. In handouts or in slides these little errors regularly lurk, to the students’ frustration. They do not want (although it may be good discipline for them) to have to check through every equation to ensure that all subscripts are present and correct and factors of 2  or p – as well as those minus signs – have not gone AWOL.

Dr I-don’t-want-to-be-here

This person believes they are too important to have to lecture, and they are going to make this manifest. They look down their noses at the scruffy audience they have to address, to convey the fact that they are Important Personages who are conferring a favour merely by turning up. Their style of lecturing is peremptory, unenthusiastic but probably efficient enough. But they are never going to convey a love of the subject to the lecture hall because their love is for themselves first and foremost, and they would vastly prefer to be furthering their ambitions by jet-setting around the world than by being chained to the lecture theatre dais.

Dr I’m-not-here

This one is the ultimate manifestation of Dr I-don’t-want-to-be-here because they aren’t, in fact, ‘here’. The students turn up only to find that their lecturer has indeed got on that plane and vanished, without troubling to find a stand-in (let alone notifying the powers-that-be that they were heading off so that they could find a replacement themselves).  Their diary is too full of opportunities they deem more important to permit them to fulfil their lecturing responsibilities; their lack of a sense of duty is such that it never crosses their mind that their own self-importance should be subservient to their obligations to the student body. This one is a hard nut for a Head of Department to rein in, but vital that they should.

Posted in Education, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Trying to Get Away from It All

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Athene Donald

I’ve been away briefly this week, to an extremely cold and windy Suffolk coast.  Not the kind of break one comes back from tanned – other than with wind-burn – or with skiing fractures, but remembering there is a world beyond academia seems important to me, to help me put the world in a bit of perspective.  Nevertheless, it has to be said the weather was disgusting even by British seaside standards. Struggling against the wind, trying to make sure my deplorable woolly hat didn’t disappear into the far distance (the wind was off the sea, a fierce easterly, so at least the hat wasn’t going to get tossed into the sea), I was disappointed to find my mind still didn’t turn off from physics.

The sea was in a fury of white foam, layer upon layer of froth as the waves beat at the steep shingle bank we stood upon. The foam was also constantly blowing up and onto the beach and onto our clothes. Why was the foam so long-lived? Irritating to find myself trying to answer that question; I was NOT there to think about colloids! I do not believe the sea is now so jammed full of detergents (as sometimes one sees when a river gets frothy due to local pollution) that the foam is permanently stabilised by Fairy Liquid and its cousins. Whether the fury of the waves was sufficient, or whether there are saccharides or other molecules excreted by marine organisms contributing to a lowering of the surface tension, I don’t know. And to be honest, when on holiday, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.

Waves is the subject I’ve been teaching to 400 eager (and not so eager) 1st years in Cambridge for the past few years; I’ve also taught it previously (in more advanced form) to second years, and I have therefore had professional occasion to consider the nature of water waves, and seek out examples of how they behave.  Shallow water waves and deep water waves have different dispersion relationships and hence behaviour, but I’m quite sure neither representation would have been adequate to describe the turbulent water that seethed at my feet.  When I first started lecturing this material some years ago now, I came across the idea (and traditional images) of a tsunami, without having any idea of what such a thing was. I thought it was some obscure Japanese folklore. Of course, since 2004 (and again in 2011), no one could possibly have any illusions about the importance of this phenomenon, even though it still doesn’t feature explicitly in my course.

There wasn’t a proper sandy beach, no shells or crabs, I saw only the remains of cuttlefish (calcium-rich aragonite, if you’re interested, and a useful and controllable buoyancy aid for the marine creature as long as it doesn’t go too deep, where apparently the gas-filled chambers of the bone implode under the pressure). The shore mainly consisted of shingle and marram grass, but there was sand a-plenty, much of it being blown into my mouth or smothering the esplanade: Lewis Carroll’s seven maids came to mind, although there was only a bulldozer which might have been attempting the same task. And where there was an accidental layer of sand covering, it had interesting ripples. Again my physicist’s mind went into annoying overdrive: what determined the periodicity of the ripples? No doubt, as with any similar instability, there is an optimum/fastest growing wavelength set by a balance of two factors, probably involving the distance the sandgrains have to migrate to build up the peaks and something to do with windspeed and how the peaks affect the local forces on the grains due to the wind. I reiterate, I was on holiday and I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THIS….I want to switch that part of my brain off. NB this means I’m not looking for a detailed analysis of the problem in any response.

Of course, battling the power of the wind could hardly fail to remind me of the possibility of wind as an alternative energy source, and towering over Kessingland where we were staying were two large wind turbines rotating at speed. The figure I had just read in the book (Project Sunshine) co-authored by my friend and long-term collaborator Tony Ryan flashed into my mind. This book, an impressive, sweeping overview of our energy problems past, present and of course future, claims the outermost tips of the blades whizz round at 200mph. Do they? I refused to try to check that mental calculation out; I wanted to head for the pub. There weren’t any offshore installations that I could see, despite what felt like a good opportunity to extract some energy from the ferocious wind, but I have been to this part of the coast when all is still and, as both Tony’s book and the earlier Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air, by my Cavendish colleague David Mackay, now CSA at the Department of Energy and Climate Change make plain, storing energy from wind turbines and other sustainable energy sources is a major, unsolved challenge.

I had come to this part of the Suffolk coast with two aims. The first I had failed at badly; I hadn’t switched off from the day-job as well as I’d hoped, as the anecdotes above will make plain. My other aim had been to come to make my peace with this particular part of the sea. Some years ago I’d visited Southwold at a time of turbulence and upset in aspects of both my professional and personal life. Whereas, throughout my life, I have found watching agitated and tumbling water to be a powerful source of peace, grounding and wonder, on that occasion I had found it simply moved me to tears with no accrued benefit. It was almost as upsetting then to find that wave-watching no longer restored my spirits as to suffer from the underlying distress itself.

To return to the same part of the coast and feel, once more, the joy derived from the unceasing and unpredictable motion of inky, churned-up water, was the true benefit of the break. It was good too to remember just how far I have been able to recover from what had seemed to be an encounter with an unassailable brick wall. If that recovery hadn’t occurred I could never have started this blog; so this seems like a good moment to remind the reader of a truth I have discussed before, that no one, however outwardly successful, is unlikely not to have been kicked in the teeth on more than one occasion. Equally they will have found some mechanism to use that to their advantage, to find a way round the immovable object blocking the way or at least to bury the bad memories so that they no longer impede daily life.

This same stretch of coast, a bit further up near Great Yarmouth, was home to that Dickensian family of Peggotty who lived in a boat on the shore – I was reminded of this as we walked past over-wintering boats dragged high up on the shingle. As it happens, I’m just reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens. It is not irrelevant to the previous paragraph that he suffered in his youth, notably from his period in a blacking factory, and yet, as she puts it

‘What is most remarkable is the strength of the image he had of himself ,his belief in his own capacities and potential, justified by everything that came after, but quite uncertain then.’

Additionally, the vulnerability he felt in the factory found its way into many of the children he characterised in his novels and provided fertile experience for him. However, few of us are likely to have quite that degree of self-belief and robustness Tomalin attributes to Dickens, particularly as at the time under consideration he was around 13 years of age. Nevertheless, it is healthy to remember that today’s catastrophe can (although it most certainly won’t necessarily do so) blend seamlessly into much more happy circumstances, with the accompanying wisdom of experience and accrued toughness. A small nugget to try to hold onto if your world appears to be crashing down around your ears.

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments