Beware of the rant

The modules we've had this term have been mostly interesting, if a little dense at times. Amongst others, we're doing Knowledge Based Systems (a foundation course for next year's AI), Data Structures and Algorithms (dull topic but great lecturer), and Automata and Formal Languages (we've just finished the basics, now we get to move onto the harder stuff).

Another is Systematic Software Development, which at least sounds as though it should be interesting, but it's actually about using formal methods for software specification and verification. Lots (more) of predicate logic and set theory, but this time in a new specification language called Z.

The lectures started out fairly predictable and boring, but no more so than a lot of other stuff we've done. My biggest gripe at the time was that the lecturer was not a natural speaker, and so his lectures involve a lot of mumbling and looking down at the notes. Wouldn't have been so much of a problem except that we didn't get paper handouts of the lectures (lecture notes are nearly always available on the module website, but usually not until after the lecture. Paper handouts in the lecture are very useful for a) following along and b) making extra notes), and also he seemed to think that an appropriate font size for the screen-projection of the PowerPoint presentation was 12pt. At 50%.

Since it was quite literally unreadable (and CS students are terribly bad at putting their hands up for anything), we ended up with a lecture that we couldn't hear, couldn't read, and weren't the slightest bit interested in. (Someone managed to tell the lecturer halfway through the second lecture, so yay, we could read the notes from the screen.)

Still, we struggled along until a couple of weeks ago, when the lecturer started writing out the lecture notes in bullet-point form on transparencies for the overhead projecter. Fair enough you might think, but he was writing them all during the lectures. The guy can write quite quickly, I'll give him that, but his handwriting often turned out illegible because of the speed. Any students trying desperately to copy down the only notes we had access to were impeded by trying to work out what was actually written on the transparency, and also by the guy whipping away the slide for a new one once he'd finished scribbling down his notes.

At this point, lecture handouts would have been really handy. He told us he would scan in the transparencies and put them up on the module website for us to download, but it might take a week or so. And I can appreciate that, except that every single lecture note was copied directly from a book, or photocopies of the book, that he had at his side and was constantly referring to. How hard would it have been to have given us photocopies too?

(He did eventually make the handwritten notes available: two weeks after he first started the scribbling, he posted a note on the website saying that there were 25 copies of the lecture notes available in the CS reception. He recommended that we share a copy between 6 or 7 students, and get them photocopied ourselves. This, by the way, came a few days before the class test — which is in half an hour's time — leaving us almost no time to revise the reams of scribbled notes from the last six lectures that we needed. Some kind soul managed to scan them in and has uploaded them for the rest of us to download; why on earth couldn't the lecturer have done the same?)

As another point, it turns out that the book he was copying the lecture notes from is available free online. As such, I see no reason to attend a single one of his lectures again.

(Such declarations aside, the module is supposedly split between 2 lecturers, the other of whom we had last year for Functional Programming, and is very good. I'm hoping fervently that this class test today in week 5 means that the first guy's lectures are over, and we can move onto the second.)

I am just staggered, again and again by this guy. He sticks out so much among the lecturers we've had so far. I really can't tell if he knows what he's doing or not. He's certainly not inspiring much confidence.

Forgive the (rare) ranting. I got into university two hours ago and I've only just warmed up since then, because of having to wait an hour at the freezing bus stop this morning before the third bus actually stopped for us instead of whizzing past. My toes were ice (and are still cold). My fingers were numb. And my iPod battery died while I was waiting.