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.

Looking back and clicking on the 'back' link, I found out that it has been four days short of one month since I last talked about a certain student, and boy have the stories piled up.

First concerns his penchant for solving the problems given in class with such concentration that he doesn't listen to the teacher anymore – not that he ever did most of the other times.

During one of our final meetings of the term I gave an exercise for solving in the middle of the period, after which we would discuss the answer. I gave them twenty minutes to finish it.

At three quarters of the time to the deadline, he finally approaches me and asks a very basic question about how to solve it, not that he will be able to in the time given, but I still answer his question. The time is up, and I ask for their notebooks, but he's still working on the problem. Still, I go to the board and discuss the answer.

A few minutes after we're finished, that's when he passes his paper. Not that I will check it anymore.

During the basic electronics lab finals, I asked for essays discussing three of the equipment that we used: the oscilloscope, the DC generator and the AC generator.

He approaches me again and asks if by DC generator I mean those big dynamos, of which most likely he has prior personal experience from his own version of science experiments.

I interrupted and said no, I mean the one that we used in the lab for the experiments.

I didn't want a repeat of his English class essays where he talked about lasers and other theoretical gadgets.

He also submitted his group's report as to why their project was out of the plus or minus ten percent tolerance values for the voltages. He answered that it was because the values of the resistors had changed from when they first used them.

This, he admittedly faults to exposing the leads of the resistors to the heat of the soldering iron for too long during their attachment to the printed circuit board.

At least that means it's a confession to how he's had two years' worth of electronics subjects and laboratories, but he's still a beginner in terms of constructing electronics gadgets on his own, without the use of his father's assistants.

Session 1593 has to learn to kowtow to the teachers to get higher grades. Class dismissed.