This weeks exercise was about pulse compression, which is used in radar and ultrasound devices. By transmitting a pulse which increases in frequency, it is possible to find out accurately where distant things are. The name of the chirp comes from the likeness to birdsong, although some birds sound much more melodic than a linear chirp.
The exercise was a disaster in terms of educational value. It consisted of me telling some students what the answer would be if they took time to convolute the signal with itself, which is not the point of an exercise at all. The exercise is too complex for the students to solve themselves in the given time, so it ends up being a "look at me, I have the answer sheet, this is how it's done" thing. When someone designed the question, they must have felt great about themselves, showing how clever educational people can be, and what clever things can be done.
I am learning basketball, and the comparison between basketball training and electrical engineering training is telling. In basketball, the trainer explains something simple, like passing the ball, then tells you to do it 100 times. I'm sure there are lots of clever and complicated things that you can do in basketball, but there are also simple things which must first be learnt. I hope that if basketball training consisted of the trainer doing round-the-back slam dunks and explaining to the students that they couldn't do this yet, then people would see that he is a useless show-off.
Looking back, the honourable thing to have done would have been to sit there and let the students try to solve the exercise themselves (this approach seems to be an exception in our faculty). They would have failed, as the mathematics was too complicated to be solved in the given time. I could then have explained to my colleagues that it is useless as an exercise.
This would have taken more courage than I have at the moment, and would probably have achieved fuck all. I guess the colleagues would probably decide that the problem is with me and not with the exercise.
2 comments:
If they have the mathematical tools, I'd just let them churn on the problem. Otherwise, just ditch the whole lesson and turn it into a lecture on self-correlation of signals. At least that's what I did in simmilar situations, and then I handed out the solution in the following week, so that their papers are complete.
The result is of course that this year the students demand handouts for the more difficult questions from their advisors which by now hate me for sure :-)
They all got a copy of the solution, and I talked a bit about auto correlation, so they all went home happy enough.
I think that students are lectured quite enough already, without problem groups turning into lectures, but I've decided to stop worrying too much.
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