Demonstrations

No, unfortunately I'm not about going to go off on one about the anti-G8 demonstrations happening at a little upper-class, golf-orientated, retirement village near me soon (yet. I may indeed broach that topic closer to the time). No. I am instead talking about that other sort of demonstrating, the one which is the life blood of all post-graduate drinking funds... practical demonstrating.

So I have signed myself over for the next 2 months to help out in undergrad practicals. I figured that I might as well go professional and be being paid £11 an hour to goof off rather than remain at amateur status. 8 hours a week - I can't go wrong really. It may also add a little much-needed structure to my otherwise laid back schedule. Careful strategic planning will be required to allow for fitting in all that crucial email and blogging time around those busy work periods.

I am quite looking forward to it actually, although I was a little nervous at first. I imagined being asked obnoxiously difficult questions from first years, and worse - my failing to respond. And if there's one thing I hate, its not having an answer to an obnoxiously difficult question from a first year. Then of course, I remembered all the way back to my own undergrad practicals, and my own obnoxiously difficult questions. Which scared me some more at first about just how obnoxiously difficult questions can be! But then came the realisation that when the postgrad demonstrators back then responded to me with:

"now really, you don't actually expect me to just tell you the answer do you?"

..that they were merely just cunningly disguising the fact that they simply had no idea what I was going on about. And for £5 per hour (or whatever they were on back then), really couldn't care less about finding out. Now, I am a little more conscientious than that. I like to know the answer to obnoxiously difficult questions, and so I shall be treated the whole thing as a personal challenge. But I then remembered something else that puts me at a distinct advantage over the undergrads (yes, ok, apart from the fact that I am now on my third degree and so have had quite a bit more time with these things), and that is: I will have at least read the practical handout which instructs what is to happen during the four hour practical. This seemingly simple step is often over-looked by most undergrads. I know that from personal experience. I think it took until my second year to realise that those things actually held helpful information. Luckily, my degree (zoology) was a bit of a no-brainer for the first 2 years. Our practicals mostly involved dissecting dead animals, fish, locusts, cow's intestines, etc.. and then drawing what we saw - its everything an intrepid zoologist needs to know. obviously. I have of course found this training vitally useful to my subsequent career advancement. 12 hours a week of drawing and sketching. Brilliant. Although I have to admit that I loved it at the time. It satisfied the small frustrated art student that was trapped inside the body of a science geek.

So I bet you're wondering what on earth sort of things I will be demonstrating? Well, the first practical sounds like it could be a bit mentally taxing really. It is a practical demontration of "animal locomotion and scaling". No doubt, the premis for these practicals will be exploring advanced theories of bio-mechanical structure and form, and applying Newton's laws of motion to the analysis of movement pattern and gait. However, in an attempt to communicate this to first years, this becomes: lets get a bunch of frogs and locusts, and then measure how far they can jump in comparison to their size, and then lets get a bunch of first years, and measure how far they can jump in comparison to their size. Genius.