Location: computer science and engineering
Time: 14:30-15:30 Friday, May 16th, 2008
Professor: Dennis V Stynes
On Friday, I attended a lecture about chemistry. The name of the lecture is Chemical Dynamics Time. It took 60 minutes. The lecture hall is huge is time, and it was full of students. More than half students are female. I thought that Canadian male do not like chemistry. The professor named Dennis V Stynes is around 40, 50 years old. He used projector as his main tool; also, he used blackboard some times. In his lecture, he just focused on the chemical element “nitrogen”. He talked about how nitrogen reacts with oxygen in different types. He also taught us how to calculate the equation. I had no idea about the names of the other chemical elements. When he talked about nitrogen react with some elements, I could not understand what he was talking about. The chemical vocabulary is difficult. Although I learnt chemistry well in my hometown, I still can not catch 100 percent about what the professor said. Suppose I thought the professor would talk about how nitrogen harm for the environment. Actually, he did not mention any about environment. His lecture was pretty boring. The students almost fell asleep (including me). Some students were talking to each other, and some students were playing computer games (Fifa); however, those students who sat in front of the professor were hard-working students. They took notes immediately after the professor changed slides. To attend a lecture is helping for my English listening skill and note-taking skill.
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2 comments:
You know, it should be possible to do some background research on the lectures you decide to visit before you go, so you can find out in advance something about the topic, maybe the professor, maybe the specific textbook reading for that lecture. Wow, you could even pre-prepare some of the key vocabulary, which could really help your understanding of the content a lot -- and give you a more fair picture of what you will really be able to do as a university student yourself. In fact, you could start here:
http://www.chem.yorku.ca/ugrad/
If it were me, I would choose a different subject, but then, I'm not a scientist. We have a link on our blog page to the York Division of Natural Science: you should be able to find a lot of information about the NATS courses through there.
Since i find it difficult to study Chemistry in my native language, i can imagine how difficult would be to study that subject in English. Alike many subjects such as Biology, Geography and etc., Chemistry has its particular vocabulary. I assume that students, who are first year at studying Chemistry, had to have become familiar with the basic-english vocabulary of Chemistry.
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