Lecturing!

I did it; I had to lecture.

All throughout the preparations I was asking myself - am I really doing this for the right reasons? Is this just because I was too lazy/behind/unimaginative to carefully construct a pre-class podcast or resources sheet and then have a more active class?

Galaxy Merger NGC 2623, as seen by HST.

I did try to hold myself to the reasons to lecture discussed in an earlier post. I'm into a part of the course where the course text is weak. We are exploring the the physics of galaxy formation, dark matter growth, dynamical friction, violent relaxation, gas cooling, star formation and stellar feedback. These processes are important at many stages of galaxy formation, and all of them are relevant for galaxy merging, see left.

Other available resources are incomplete or overly technical/detailed (papers or scary textbooks), and I needed to craft a 'middle way' that built intuition but is reasonably complete. For a couple of sessions I had small lectures coupled with some activities (e.g., them trying to figure out how to explain phenomena to a beginning undergrad as an attempt to synthesize the concepts by being put into their own words). Last class was all lecture(!)

But, lecture is different from when I taught this class traditionally two years ago. The students are very used to interrupting, asking questions; challenging assumptions. I still try to sit near the middle of the side of the table, which I think keeps the atmosphere less formal, more like a journal club. They're still grappling with the material during class. I've still got some pre-class and in-class assessment to do to see how effective this sequence of activities has been, but I feel like this has been a reasonably successful foray into small amounts of lecturing without ruining the active overall atmosphere of the class.