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

Finally got to ride the 7am shuttle this morning. It wasn't an impatient wait, but since the convenience store of the gas station is still sparsely supplied after its renovation, it's not a comfortable place to have a time-filler breakfast in yet.

Getting back to last Tuesday, I had to leave my 240-410pm graphing class early again because of the college faculty meeting scheduled at 330pm.

It was probably the meeting where I talked the most, not only on questions addressed to me by the dean, but also on topics to which others had a concern that I was very familiar with a similar foolproof procedure to.

Probably the most interesting aspect of the meeting was the approval of three elective courses that will be available to the whole university, one of which was introduction to robotics (a requirement for engineering students), and a subject about pop culture offered by one or more of the English teachers. I think the third one might be sociology or religion related. I guess having an basic astronomy course which would be available to all students (and not just to Business and Economics or Education majors - especially since it's not credited to Science students at the moment) would not be far behind.

Second, the dean was thinking about an interactive science works exhibit that may be opened to the grade school and high school students. I'm not sure who has the original book we used to have for demonstrative experiments in science, but at the very least, probably some or most of those are available on the internet. And unless otherwise specified, I'll assume I'm to work on this with zero budget and therefore supposed to use cheap discarded materials.

Of course some plans for Christmas and January were also touched upon also.

Earlier today I had the quiz in mathematical methods, with ten questions at five points each for fifty points total.

I worked on that for more than an hour from scratch Tuesday night, and today realized that two of the problems were worded erroneously. That led to a ten-point (twnty percent!) bonus for the students.

Even with this though, one and a half hours were still not enough for them to finish everything, so they requested for the quiz to be extended to the lunchtime session. I wouldn't agree, but I did give it to them as an "assignment" (25% of the final grade instead of 20%) for 12pm.

At the start of the period, even though some were still "writing" down their answers, I asked for their papers already because I said I will be discussing the answers. That was when I told them that the second problem was also a bonus, because there was no way to go beyond the roundabout equation at a certain point.

With the first problem, I also showed them that acting on their unconfirmed assumptions (that the result would be simpler than what their manipulation of the numbers was leading them) are dangerous because they didn't ask if it was correct.

So the only hitch here was that the first two items were initially difficult for them, and the first real easy one was the third number.

This goes against the unwritten rule that the easier problems should be given first and get progressively more complicated. What with the errors in my last exam in astronomy, I'll have to be more careful with the next ones - maybe even write them a week in advance.