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

Biggest news first: the acquaintance party on Friday has been postponed, because even though (exactly) 51% of the student population committed on paper last Monday, only 41% paid their fees yesterday.

This is, of course, too bad, especially for the members of the Dance Troupe who have been practicing the past three days for their number during the program. It gives them more time to perfect their routine for the performance though.

In my Graphics One classes yesterday I gave them the hard deadline of finishing up to Exercise 10 during those sessions, even though up to Exercise 9 had been given last week and I uploaded the files for up to Exercise 14 in the networked computer that morning. That would give them an average of 3 exercises per meeting, which hopefully will go up as the term progresses and they become more familiar with the software.

At the very least I’ll be able to see not only who are the fast workers, but also those (other than my cousin) who completes beyond the minimum requirements and those that would rather be done with what is asked then leave early and leave everything else for the next time.

There were some students who thought it was an error on my part when they saw that Exercise 8 only had one file inside the compressed folder. I told them to read the instructions first, which would have said they were supposed to open a previously created design file.

I also had to introduce some students to the concept of zooming their view in a document when they could not read the relatively small font of a screen-captured table.

By the third time a student told me that it was unclear (the same guy who asked me to check his test paper already, several days later asked me if I knew his score, wanted me to reconsider some of his answers so he’d get a “passing” score, who last Tuesday in Trig asked me at the start of the class if I could go over what we discussed the previous meeting – to which I answered I always have a review session before the scheduled exam – and to whom, when at the end of the meeting he asked me what we were going to do in Graphics that Wednesday, I answered: same as the last two weeks) I cut through his verbalizing his complaint, and said, “Click View, Zoom, 150%” to which he reacted, “Oh.”

In fact, he’s also one of those who (as I wanted to detect) stopped at Exercise 10, submitted his disk and exited the computer room.

Wow, that was some unexpected hostility. Not surprisingly, his name is Dudley (just because I don’t think this is my last mention of him, and I don’t want to keep referring to him as “that guy”), but he won’t hear me giving him a reason to complain about me, my teaching methods or that I’m not being impartial to him in class.

In electricity and magnetism lab we had the second experiment: EMF, Terminal Voltage and Internal Resistance. Two of the groups soldered their wire connector alligator clips first; to which I counted they only needed five for the circuit given. I also had to scrap the part that used the Daniell cell, which we don’t have. We were out of the lab less than two hours later, and the workday ended.