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

There was one incident each from all three of my astronomy classes today.

In the first one, after I had announced about the upcoming quiz and I was explaining the lesson again to one of their classmates when the drone of male voices from the back just became too loud to bear and be heard over. I mean I couldn’t even hear myself.

I just said, in a not so raised voice, “If many of you don’t pass in the quiz…”

And they were silent. Of course, they were expecting there to be a full-blown tirade but I didn’t. Instead
I just continued with the lesson. They were attentive until the end.

For some reason one of the guys in that corner of the room raised his hand at the end of the lesson and asked when the stargazing was, and I said, “When we finish with the constellations.”

“And when is that?”

“How many constellations did I list down last week?” Scrambling for notebooks. “How many have we discussed so far? Two.”

“Is the stargazing overnight?”

“The first stargazing is early evening in campus. Subsequent sessions (overnight or off-campus) will depend on the behavior of the class.”

That’ll scare them.

In my second class, which is one-and-a-half hours, the students were already getting overloaded two-thirds through the lecture. I couldn’t stop though otherwise they’d be way behind the other two three-session-a-week classes. As I said, it’s a little difficult pacing these varied classes similarly.

In my third class, we were not able to finish the lesson on the zodiac constellation calendar because they had trouble understanding some of the earlier, simpler concepts. I had to give the steps several times in different dumbed-down formats. I also just gave the answers to the examples and said whoever had a question could just go to the teacher’s table. I wasn’t really mad, but the students thought I was, and they said so.

I did not get to finish all the parts, but that just means there is at least one topic in each class I haven’t discussed that’s already done in the others.