Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

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

On the fifth day of the sixth week of the first term for the new school year in my Mathematical Methods One class we had our fifth quiz, the one with the graphing.

The girl who promised was able to bring a lot of papers for her classmates to use, but there were still a lot of students, despite what I thought to be clear instructions, who went up to ask me if all the problems were supposed to be graphed instead of just the first part and the third part.

There were, also some students who did hear or obey the verbal order to write their names on all the graphing papers.

In the Science Fiction Literature class later that day, I led the discussion on the movies “Total Recall” and “Impostor”, eventually leading to a generalization of Philip K. Dick’s general trend in the stories of his that have been made into films.

We had a side topic on terra forming as illustrated in the movie, and in “Red Planet” which they have seen before when “I, Robot” wouldn’t run on any of the players the media lab technicians brought out the time they were supposed watch.

I also went into a technical comparison of “evolution” and “mutation” when the physical aberrations in the first movie came into question.

There was also a short debate about whether or not the alien deep cover agents shown in “Impostor” could be considered as suicide bombers or not.

Afterwards we talked about their final project in class, and the groupings that went along with it. Some of the students, particularly the higher-scoring ones, asked if they could have their own groups.

The alternative their teacher Rae and I offered them was to have just three big groups, but they had to have two short films as their output based on two different concept proposals. And to stop their “threat” that they would pour more into one work and have the other mediocre, their grade would be based on the average of the two submissions.

There was even one suggestion of cutting the class into Communication Arts majors and Computer Science majors, and having three films as their assignment. I was open to it, but Rae wasn’t. Maybe she didn’t like the division after the school was going through so much trouble to have the different courses intermingle as much as possible, or making it into an unofficial proving ground about which discipline is “better”. I thought it would show batch solidarity though, but that’s probably not as important.

I’ll add a few more tidbits next time. But for now, this is where I tuck session 635 in. Class dismissed.