Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

It seems that I didn’t mention two weeks ago about the student-faculty interaction where the freshies got introduced to the faculty and the rest of the students taking the same major, and vice versa. The Physics Society was the one who sponsored this “acquaintance party”. The only gripe I have about the whole event is that it was held in an auditorium instead of a room with a wide-open space where everyone could stand around and interact. What actually happened was that everyone was sitting down, the students of the same batch of course clumped together, just like most of the faculty.

It does seem that more of the majors are greeting me in the campus than before. But that can be because at the last minute, I was tasked to perform on behalf of the faculty, a song number. What I didn’t expect though was that we were up first, before the seniors or the juniors took the stage.

And the proposed “big brother/sister” program of supporting the students through their studies doesn’t seem to have taken off. It was a little vague anyway. Who chooses to be paired with whom: the teacher or the student? And is it a strictly a one-on-one set-up or can a faculty member advise several students?

It’s still really up to the teachers handling the freshies’ first orientation course.

Gave my first long exam to all my astronomy classes today. I guess it was okay, with students finishing a little more than halfway through the period and submitting their papers. I haven’t checked them though.

In my 230pm class, some of the students who finished early and stepped out returned asking me what we were going to do after the test. Nothing planned, I said.
Unlike some teachers, I always let the scheduled test take up the entire period. This is because otherwise, if I attempted to lecture before a set thirty or forty-minute quiz, a lot of the students would be reviewing instead of paying attention.

The same is true if I give the test at the start of the class, allow them only a certain number of minutes to answer it, and then have a lecture afterwards. First of all, it is unfair to those who are not as fast as the others in answering. After all, setting the end time of such a task is arbitrary on my part. So might as well let them take the whole hour or hour-and-a-half.

Second, if I’m going to start a new topic and not discuss the answers to the test, a lot of students are still going to be distracted looking through their notes if they answered correctly instead of listening. And I prefer to tell them the answers only if the same lesson will be part of a future exam. If that were the case, I’d only review the subject after I’d checked their papers and found out where most of them made mistakes, which means at least the next
meeting.

I would not have enough time to analyze their papers if I gave them a test, have them check each other’s work, then discuss the answers, all in the same period.

Also in the 230pm class, some students pleaded with me to let them use the sliding calendar, even showing me that they didn’t write any notes on the constellations there. I had to allow it. Can’t have anything that can be construed as preventing them from getting a passing grade.