Tutorial

I held a tutorial for some students who aren't studying physics, but need to take a physics course. Of the 20 people only five turned up, but the five who were there were friendly, quite well prepared and happy to complete the exercises on the blackboard. This is good, as I tend to get rather confused when writing things on the blackboard. My main problems are that I can never quite decide which symbol to use to represent a physical property (there are just too many options), my rho looks like a p, I randomly drop symbols and I sometimes say something completely different to what I write. I also have a habit of losing the piece of paper with the answers on, and slowly taking all the pieces of chalk and depositing them randomly around the room. I think that I could have a long career as a lecturer in front of me.

As I say, it turned out very well, as the students rapidly gained in confidence and were quite happy to complete the exercises themselves, which is the point of the whole thing anyway.

If you want to read a more interesting blog than this one, I would suggest the BBC political editor, Nick Robinson. Tony Blair today effectively sacked his under-fire home secretary, Charles Clarke, after a some rather disappointing local election results.

I’ve often interviewed resigning ministers, but this was amongst the bizarrest. When I was called to be told the news, I was naked in bed in a Westminster hotel hoping to get at least an hour’s sleep, having stayed up all night covering the local elections. The interesting discovery I’ve made is that you can go from being in bed to attending a resignation statement in exactly seven minutes.