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

Well, I’ve finished all my astronomy classes to the same point. We’ve done up to eight of the twelve zodiac constellations and their associated (North and South) constellations. I scheduled the first long exam on Monday next week, two weeks after the first quiz. Asked by some of the students why it seemed to be so soon, I said that it was to keep the coverage of the exam small. When I let them decide if they wanted the exam after we had taken up all the constellations, there was a resounding “no!”

I told the classes to photocopy the sample of how they’re going to answer the zodiac constellation calendar questions in the exam, when we’ll practice for the rest of the week. Some students thought it was a new way of using their calendar, on top of everything else about it we’ve discussed, and I had to clear up that misconception.

Last Friday, I forgot to mention that one of the students who got very low in my College of Education class had approached me asking for a book where she can further research about the zodiac constellation calendar. Unfortunately, there is no other material, because, too humble as I am to say it to my class, it’s all of my own devising. There are more sophisticated and automatic ways of finding out what constellations are visible for a certain month and time, but my purpose here was to introduce a measure of analysis and procedure into a class which would otherwise turn into mostly memorization, without getting down to mathematics. How to introduce that in the other topics, I’m still in the process of formulating.

In the programming class, a handful of students took the entire period answering the exam. In fact, some of them even went out after I had given the paper to borrow a calculator from the Lost and Found office, because of some of the computations involved. For the first time in years, the professor of the next period walked in with me still in the room, and it turned out to be my old teacher in algebra. At least she didn’t get mad like I’ve heard some older faculty did when classes overlap.

Looking over the students’ papers, it seems their most common mistake involves assigning values to an integer variable involved in a division operation. Well, that’s something else to clarify in our next lecture class.

On the Mensa front, on the way to my first class at 920am, I gave the 90+ test papers to the person who’s going to check them. This is a strictly volunteer job, and this person, unlike all of us who have been given free meals during the test sessions, has not had any kind of compensation for his job. I told him that despite his professed shyness, the officers would like to treat him to lunch or something one time, preferably on the next event.

He said he’ll have the papers back to me by late afternoon.