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

Second time in a row I've been late for my 8am class because of the long line at the terminal. And this time there was only a drizzle for about a few minutes while I was getting a shower. I'm seriously considering waking up at 5am next time and beating the commuters.

Now the thing is, that means I now have 4.5 hours to make up for my 8-930am class. And checking their schedules, the only time they're free in common is 1120am to 1250pm. But most of them have classes from 940-1110am and 1-230pm. So if I take three sessions for this coming Thursday, and Tuesday + Thursday next week, the students will have no time for lunch. So I'm thinking of just having 45 minute classes from 12pm to 1245pm for the next three weeks during Tuesdays and Thursdays. That gives them 50 minutes to eat. Hopefully the dean will approve it, because otherwise, I'll have schedule Saturday sessions.

I wanted to talk to the Dean about it, but his secretary said he was busy with meetings all day, so I just wrote a letter with my make-up class form, that needs his signature anyway.

Something left over from last time: the third member of the group of Computer Science majors that have a thesis on astronomy is male (unlike the two female programmers) and he is in charge of getting the history of the department for their paper. This is because if their thesis had been a program for an outside company, they would have had to look into the background of that firm also.

What I found somewhat questionable was that the student was asking me for all the details of the department history, not just related to teaching astronomy. Are the departmental heirarchy and research group assignments really relevant to their paper or just page fillers?

As to the facts that ARE related to astronomy, it would be best for him to ask the Registrar's Office about it, because their records are more complete than relying on just my memory. He also lay importance to the things I remember about how many sections and students there were in Astronomy when I first started teaching, and who were the teachers teaching it, as opposed to the stats currently. Again, something more reliably answered by the University's record keepers, as well as being less questioned by their panel, if ever.

I don't know if he approached the chairman of the department with what I consider to be the relavant questions such as why astronomy was offered as a subject in the first place, although if he did ask that, he might get an unexpected answer as to the future of astronomy as a subject in the university.