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

It was raining in Enchanted Kingdom last Saturday, but not continuously enough for the management to give the park-goers free return tickets as their promo said if it there was a shower for more than 15 minutes at a time.

I had only given my celphone number to my 230pm class, because they were the only ones who asked for it. Besides the fact that they are the class this term that seems to need the most handholding, it was also the class where majority of the students was going to commute to the park. So it was best to give them a hotline just in case they took the wrong bus or something.

Nothing like that happened, fortunately. Of the only text messages I got one was from a student asking where I was. I answered that I was still on the way. Another asked if the activity sheet was to be completed by group or individually.

Two of the students who picked up their tickets last Saturday also offered to give me a ride to the place, but I had to decline because it wasn’t near the deadline I set that I’d be leaving the office, and I couldn’t ask them to wait.

In the end I left five tickets in my drawer at 10am, and I just left a note on the chalkboard that the students can give their name any teacher present in the department to get the labeled tickets in my drawer.

This morning when I checked, only one ticket was left there. In class today, the guy who paid for that ticket said that he assumed I was going to give him the ticket in the park. Besides not being what I had announced in class, why would I do that and not give him any way to contact me when he got there? I just told him the ticket could be rebooked within the next six months. I didn’t tell him how much he would have to pay, which is the rest of the price of a regular ticket, unless he rebooked it with 30 new tickets bought.

As I had already told both my 920am & 230pm classes last Friday to bring their time zone conversion tables today, that was the activity we performed, after the short lecture on the length of day as opposed to the period of rotation of the Earth, and the International Date Line. Eight different times in five locations seemed too much for them to finish in less than 30 minutes though.

In my 1250pm class, I finished the celestial coordinates and telescope mounts discussion, and I gave them the personal constellation creation exercise. Since, like my 920am class, I won’t be meeting them until next Monday, I gave them the assignments for the next group activities, including the tide calendar, the shadowed ball for determining the phases of the moon, and the time zone conversion tables for the 1250pm class.

In my 920am class, they also requested a change of groupings, because all the smart students had ended up in the same foursome when they chose their own group mates, and when I grouped them alphabetically. Now they want me to pair the overachievers with the under-performers, based on their exam scores, to balance it out. Not that it’s the first time I’ve done that. And it’s up to them to tell me about people not doing their share, or the “riders” as they call them.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about the introductory programming exam, my other special student, and my two thesis advisees consulting.