Seen and heard in Monday classes

March 22nd, 2005 by lynnylchan under Uncategorized

Monday was a good day for lecture antics. My lecturer for Science of Music is, by profession, a Physics lecturer. He handles the Science of Music module because he was the one who came up with it. And on this day, he brought a MIDI box to class to show us. So he was standing by the podium, holding up the little box (about CD-size) and telling us what it does when some smart guy in the back requests,

“Prof Tan, can you use the imager?”

The imager is what I call a visualizer. Basically it’s a camera attached to a stand and works like a projector. It’s a bit like a cross between a webcam and the traditional OHP. It’s a common tool at this level of education, I used them back in junior college.

The professor looked at the table, and at the previously unnoticed black implement.
“Oh, all right. I’ve never used one before.” So he got it to work and display properly, and then the fun started. He realised what the buttons did, and pressed one while mumbling “zoom in” and voila! the image magnified alarmingly. “Zoom out,” he muttered, and it returned to a more normal zoom distance. Then he picked up the box and raised it near the camera lens and the object on screen rushed out at us. We all started laughing at this point, because it was just so incongrous. Technology makes kids of us all. I hope we taught him something useful yesterday.

And in tutorial… (this bit is very much like Agagooga’s snippets of mispronunciations)
“So you can see they’re very close apart”
Pray tell, sir, how are they close apart? I didn’t realise we were in creative writing class exploring romantic paradoxes. Like, “on our first date, we sat very close apart” or something like that?

And in the same tutorial, I had a very nasty surprise. The final exam was not multiple-choice. It involved writing. I was sitting there swearing in shock for a few moments, because that meant I had to revamp my entire study plan to accommodate a few days of brain-busting memorization of terminology. I’ve lost hope of doing well for this module. Please just let me get a B, I promise I’ll be satisfied! (Though of course the mugger toad in me demands nothing less than A-.)

One month to exams. That means the blanket of tension and gloom will once again descend upon Yousucks.