My name's Ian Mcarthur, I'm the head of the school of Physics and even though
I'm head of school i like to teach so I have a teaching load
and the subjects i teach
are sort of at the frontiers of modern physics so i'm
very lucky to be able to have subjects like that because
students tend to like them
He's always really clear when he talks and he always accepts lots of questions
during the lectures. And he explains it really well as well.
There's something really important about handwriting. Lecture slides don't cut it.
And so, even if the
notes are handwritten versus the notes being on powerpoint slides, it makes a massive
difference i think.
I find the notes are very sequential and in an order
that is made for you to understand. I'd have to agree that
Ian is definitely my favourite lecturer this semester. He'll give you the notes but
then some of the notes you actually write in
class with him and that sort of forces you to engage and it
forces you to keep up and understand as he's going along.
and it slows down how he talks because obviously he's having to talk at the
same pace that he's writing at the same pace that you're writing
One of the features of my lectures is that i don't stick rigidly to a given text
that's mainly because i can't find a book that
does things the way i want to and so part of the lecture process
is to give the students basically a handwritten text book
either through notes that i hand out or
notes that they write themselves during the lectures.
I put material on the visualiser
Because University now is really pressed for time it forces you to sit down and
cover something as opposed to maybe just sitting and watching
the lecture video and not really having it sink in
the weekly assignments make you, apart from also watching the lecture
really go through it and understand the material that you've covered
it's impossible to fall behind basically in physics
unless you don't do all the assignments but then you fail and you have to do the course again
It's impossible
yeah i just find it really motivates you and keeps you on the ball.
i believe that if students are to
get value out of coming to lectures then they need to have
looked over the material in the previous lecture and
I think a short assignment a week is a way to ensure that students
actually look back on the lecture
I encourage them to talk about it with their peers but they
have to submit their own written version but they're encouraged to discuss
amongst themselves
how to solve problems. I've been teaching some of these courses
for a while and the
marking provided feedback in restructuring the courses
or rearranging the course because i could see that students were
not understanding certain things. They require
quite a lot of mathematics and so
one of the goals of my teaching is to
help students not be afraid of that and the main way
I try to do that is by getting them to solve lots of problems
so they gain confidence. If you want to understand modern physics you have to
really be able to do the mathematics that goes with it. That said, it's not all mathematics and there's a
lot of
physical principles that have to be drawn out so
that's what I use the lectures for
(lecture material)
The thing Ian does that makes it so easy to follow along with is
the way he explains the concepts. He explains them in a way
which is really easy to understand
and he kind of understands where we're coming from as students
These are not easy subjects and
it's very easy for students to get bamboozled and lost
and my aim is to try to present it clearly and
logically and in a way that they can build
on their knowledge and feel confident. I think
it's not their intellect that matters
it's that they're engaged. If you care about the students and where they're
going and what that they're learning. Are they learning the
material? Which you don't find with everyone.
He makes himself more accessible
and he just gives of a vibe that
students are more willing to go up and say 'I don't understand this'
as opposed to some other classes where
students are more likely to maybe ignore
the fact that they haven't understood something. I really enjoy teaching
I believe we have fantastic students and
I'm very keen to give them the best
we possibly can so, my style works for the subject i teach
I believe but I'm happy to talk to people
who may be interested to discuss when i'm doing
i certainly look forward to looking at what other people are doing to see if i can incorporate some elements into
my teaching