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

The Innovative Teaching seminar last Friday took the whole day, in fact, beyond the set ending time, but that was partly because the Dean and the speaker had lunch outside the campus and returned a little later than expected.

The speaker was in fact a former Dean of Student Affairs who was also a fellow member in the faculty band back when it was active.

One of the highlights of the seminar for me was when he asked us to think of our favorite and least favorite teachers, and to cite three specific things that they did that we remember. We all had the idea that he was talking about in terms of what we could apply to our teaching methods and not just because they were more than fairly considerate (or inconsiderate, as the case may be) to us personally.

My least favorite teacher was in Filipino 1, during the first term of freshman year at that. First of all, even before such things were prohibited, she smoked and drank (soda only, but what the hey) in class. Second, one time she told us she had a hangover and didn’t feel like teaching, so she told us to look at the clouds outside the window for the whole period and write down our impressions in our notebook.
Third, she required us to watch two plays in the state university, all the way on the other side of the metropolis, because she was starring in one and wrote the other.

Fourth, (yeah, he only said three things, but she was particularly bad) she did not adhere to submission deadlines strictly. She told us to pass this audio tape requirement on a Wednesday, but a slacker group of classmates of ours said our projects were still in her pigeon box when they submitted on Thursday, having only started working on their project Wednesday night.

Lastly, we her grading system was suspiciously arbitrary, asking us to stand up when she called our names during the last day of classes, then she’d write down the grade to be shown. For mine, in fact, she stage whispered it in the room when it took me too long to get among the seats from the back.

My favorite teacher, just to show my non-bias, also hailed from the state university. He was my teacher in several programming electronics major subjects, and later on became my co-teacher.

The first thing that impressed me about him was how he intimidated the class during the first meeting by walking up and down the platform like a general while telling us about his requirements, class rules and expectations.

Second, when I explained my board work in front of the class (on a short assembly language program and how it manipulated the registers) he said he was going to give me extra credit for giving a very good and detailed description, despite the fact that I started out with promoting the new org shirt, which I wore over my other shirt at the time.

Third and last, he openly showed his disapproval when I didn’t perform in class as well as we both expected due to some personal problems I had at the time (which, in retrospect, weren’t as big a deal as I had made out them to be for that moment).

There are still a lot of things I learned at that seminar, but they could fill several days worth of entries here. I’ll just probably mention them as they become relevant to my daily posts, or if I get reminded of some of them from what happens at work.