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Date: 06/10/2003 - 07/10/2003

After two days of lectures I had a better idea of what each course was like.

After a couple of days of lectures I had been to at least one lecture in each of my six courses, and had found the teaching styles of each were very different. I had already described the teaching style of my calculus lectures in My first lecture, here is a short description of the others.

Linear mathematics was taught by Dr David Penman, who was writing the course notes as we went along and handing them out before each lecture. Because the lecture was the first time they were used there were a few typos and simple errors which needed to be corrected as we went along. The lectures style here was different to the calculus lectures, the lecturer would go through the notes, sometime adding bits or writing stuff on the board, and rather than taking our own notes we would just add bits to the lecture notes. Also there was some element of audience participation, we were asked to shout out the answers to examples, and space was left in the notes for us to fill in participative examples, which we were supposed to do as a class.

Finite mathematics was taught by Professor Peter Higgins, who had produced a large, detailed set of notes for us to use. The style here was mainly him reading through the notes and often doing examples on the board or adding small parts which he didn't think were covered well in the notes. The meant that usually I just added the occasional note to my set of printed notes, but sometime went onto another page of A4 if something needed to be explained in much more depth than in the notes. The finite maths class was quite large because in addition to the maths students, it was also taken by the computing science students. This meant it was held in one of the lecture halls, and so there was no audience participation at all.

Introduction to economics was taught by Dr George Symeonidis, who had also written a large, comprehensive set of lecture notes, but instead of being given these we had to go to the economics office and pay £2 to pick them up. The teaching style was that the lecture notes were put up on the overhead projector, and were talked through be the lecturer. At the same time, the lecturer went though examples, or noted important points on another OHP. In this lecture I decided to take quite long notes on A4 because there were some differences between the notes and what the lecturer was saying.

My last subject was introduction to programming, taught by Mr Bill Hart, where there were no printed lecture notes, but we could download the slides used in the lectures off the departmental website. This lecture consisted mainly of reading information off the slides but also some parts of programs and things were written up on the board. I didn't bother making notes in this lecture because I already knew how to program.