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

In my three astronomy classes today we started watching the movie “Contact”, which I’m expecting to last the entire week. After all, the movie runs for two-and-a-half hours.

I needed to ensure that they would take special note of the scientific portions of the movie that are relevant to our lesson. For this, I prepared some guide questions that the students were supposed to answer and submit at the end of the period.
Obviously, this also doubled as their attendance.

In the two one-hour classes, we more or less stopped at the same point. Only my 1250pm class reached the halfway point of the movie, and I gave them an additional question they had to answer to ensure their attentiveness beyond the first hour of the movie.

There is a student in my 920am class, who always clarifies a point from the lectures during our discussion on the constellations. I thought for once that he would not have any questions after watching part of the movie, but instead he asked about when the next test would be. I just told him I had not planned it yet.

In my 920am class, they asked to go up the spiral staircase as soon as they realized where we were. But it’s for that purpose that I keep the door at the top of the staircase locked until I decide that they’re ready to go up there. It didn’t stop them from lying to their classmates though about what they saw at the top of the staircase.

During my 230pm class, it also started to rain outside. Some of the students were sufficiently distracted to look out through the blinds, considering they would have to pass relatively open areas to get to their next class.

I was late for my 1020am introductory programming class, because I had to walk all the way from the fifth floor of the Engineering building to the department on the fourth floor of the Science building, then back down to the second floor where my class met.

I remember a student in one of my previous astronomy classes that volunteered to reserve the TV and VHS player for our regular classroom so that they did not have to travel all the way to the Observatory just to watch the movie. That was fine with me too. Either way, I didn’t have to reserve for use of the equipment.

I discussed the multi-branch conditional statement or the “select case”, based on several values of a single variable or operation. It was then that I clarified on the comparison or relational operations as used with strings. I had to give an impromptu example of a program that tells people with surnames starting in certain letters they are assigned to different rooms.
I also gave an example for taking advantage of the sequence that the different values are entered in the cases to make simpler ranges of values in the succeeding cases.

We did run out of time discussing the last example, which had us asking for the time as expressed in hours and minutes and assigned to two different variables. So I just gave that correction as an assignment, the first one I have given to this class.