Apathy Sketchpad

Right at the start of this year, I told everybody that I did not ever want to become a physics lecturer. The issue is not so clear cut now, though. A few facts have come to my attention which have made the prospect variously more appealing, less appealing, or often both.

The first is that there seem to be an awful lot of offices around the department with names on the side, many of which don’t appear on the timetable. These people have offices, and presumably therefore salaries, but no actual teaching duties. More appealing. Many of these offices, though, have up to nine names on the door. Less appealing, particularly if one has to share with Mike Reis.

The second fact is that you do not need to know very much about mathematics (more appealing), physics (less appealing), or indeed anything at all (much less appealing). For example, it is a widely held belief amongst the lecturers that by modelling bus timetables as a Poissonian distribution you can explain why they come in threes. As much for my own pride as anything else, I am going to choose to assume that the majority of the readership have no idea what a Poissonian distribution is, and rather that attempt to change that I will simply say that this is a false assumption, improperly analysed, misinterpreted, and similarly hacked around to produce an effect seen more frequently in the imagination than on actual roads, and if I did explain the Poissonian distribution to you you would probably be thinking “how could they be so stupid?”, “that needs a name?”, or perhaps “you’re boring me. I’m bored”. Another prime example showed itself in a tutorial today. A question was posed about how long it would take to spool 10m of tape onto a reel, and was intended to test our knowledge of calculus, particularly integration. One student had solved the problem rather neatly by using an arithmetic series, which is almost calculus, but not quite. I took one look at the question, thought for a minute or so, and announced that I could solve the problem in about two minutes without going anywhere near any calculus. I was lying, in fact. It would only take one minute. I was asked how, explained it a couple of times, and then gave up and let the professor fill a couple of whiteboards with formulæ for a quarter of an hour and arrive at the exact same results we had. Another example it that Dr. Clarke has now held on to Adam’s essay for an entire year, and has failed to even start marking it.

I think I’d like a job where I got an office, broadband internet, no actual work, and incompetence would not be noticed.