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

One more precedent: first full day of class suspension. I was still in bed at 7am when I got a text from one of my co-teachers asking if there were classes yesterday. Unfortunately, the school’s text message announcement service returned an error. At least it didn’t deduct P2.50 from my credits even when it wasn’t working. When I tried it last Tuesday, it only told me that the course card distribution was on April 15, so I knew it hadn’t been updated in more than a month.

After I had already brought down my bathing implements, that’s when I received a text from another of my co-teachers saying that the Executive Vice President’s office had declared classes suspended as of 6:55am, and please pass the message on.
This method of information dissemination had been used already the past school year for two consecutive days. It was suspiciously easy for a prankster to just edit the announcement from the first day of class suspension though and send it on the second day, even if it wasn’t true.

It was also the telecommunications company’s jackpot, just like that phony text about the Pope having died. Let’s say I send such a text message to one of my students in a class of 40. She could pass it to all of her classmates already, but each of those recipients can also assume he was the only one that first student sent the message to. So at worst, each student sends it again to the rest of the class except the first student. That’s roughly 1,500 credits wasted right there.

On the concrete side though, I was relieved at the cancellation because that means I don’t have to start my programming class lecture in the computer lab.
That class only meets twice a week, once in the classroom and once in the computer lab. Since I started teaching programming, I have made it a rule never to lecture in the lab, because I don’t want the students to complain that they don’t get enough time in the lab to complete their programs when they paid so much for using it.

Since I used the lecture session last Monday for discussing class policies, I didn’t lecture. I had thought of just passing around handouts for the students to follow the procedure during the lab session, so they’ll still use the lab session hands on instead of listening to a lecture. But now I’ve been spared that. I get to lecture the basics of programming in the classroom on Monday.

For tomorrow, therefore, I only have three classes, all of which are astronomy.

When I got to school today, by the way, I was told that teachers were still allowed in the campus yesterday even after the suspension was announced, which was what some of my co-teachers did since they had commuted all the way to school anyway. I could have used all that time yesterday to get ahead of my lecture preparations and attendance checklists.

My thesis student, whose consultation for yesterday of course didn’t push through, caught me this afternoon. He asked again about the origin of some formula in his primary reference for the programming code. Instead of looking up the answer for him, I just told him to reread the sections before the part he couldn’t understand, or to look up the authors on the internet for questioning, or just come up with his best assumption in case the panel does ask him about it.

That’s it. A five-minute discussion and he’s out-of-contact again for who knows how long.