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.

Since the engineering faculty will be leaving for our new faculty room very, very soon, there has been a scrambling now to get one of the five “choice” cubicles that will be vacated by us in the old and common faculty room.

Already there have been two of my co-teachers who have approached me for the spot (corner of the room, beside the air conditioner, farthest from the entrance and thus I can spot a long way off if any students are approaching and thus stop them before they come any closer and thus compromise the security of any confidential papers such as exams I might have lying about).

So in our meeting for the School of Arts and Sciences earlier, I asked the dean as to who should have priority in terms of wanting to move to my “kingdom”.

Seniority, determined by date of entry to the college, was suggested and agreed upon. Not that there should have been any contest if the dean had said it would be final.

The case is true with the attendance checking for faculty members in their classes, historically done by a registrar’s office personnel making the rounds. It has devolved to a video camera which will not be regularly monitored anyway (just in extreme cases) that is not any help at all for the Physical Education teachers since only the fourth floor hallways will be shot and recorded.

There was such a long discussion about it that there was finally a vote that determined even that should be done away with, as well as the log sheet in each class room.

But if the Executive Vice President had laid down the law, even the faculty members would not have been able to protest the use of a camera, monitored or not.

Reminds me also of the long winded debate three annual workshops ago about requiring the checking of attendance for the college students, with a former co-teacher of mine extending the talks further and further by championing the case of the hypothetical one in a million great student who doesn’t attend classes.

If that’s the case, I say, we have nothing further to offer that person if he doesn’t want to be taught the discipline of punctuality, so he just might as well enroll in a distance-learning course. Besides, since then it surfaced that that teacher failed one of the now-graduates in a class because of excessive absences, when she passed his friend with the same class standing and attendance; it obviously came down to her not liking his disrespectful attitude.

Session 1493 isn’t present. Class dismissed.