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

Last night I had a meeting with two officemates to discuss the questions we needed to formulate for the report on the experiment of Concurrent Forces that would replace the lab report format with the theory and the conclusion and everything.

This, of course may or may not be in line with the proposed open laboratory, where students will get to perform the experiments they want (from a short approved list) in the sequence they want, when they want to.

I am also under the impression that this may also be tied in with doing away with the stardard procedures for the experiments altogether. So in the questions I have formulated, I have tried to come up with hints as to the set up the students should make in order to form the "correct impression" about the principle behind the experiment.

With that one out of the way, I only have to worry about the experiment on Resistors in Series and Parallel, for which I am the leader. Instead of brainstorming though, which will require me to get our probably-not-so-common schedules, I just plan to come up with my own questions and pass it over to them for comments and additions, and ask my two groupmates to do the same. Then I'll unify all our inputs. The deadline is two weeks away anyway, during finals week.

Today in both of my classes I tackled the last topics in the Cycles of Nature: Seasons, including the origin of the names of the months as we know them, the varying number of days for each month and the reason behind the assingment of the leap years as they are.

In my first class though, I stopped there, even though there was still thirty minutes left in the period. This is because earlier, I realized that with the finals starting on Thursday, Dec. 11, today I have four hours of class time left each in my 1030am and 230pm classes but only three hours for my Monday-Friday 1250pm class.

That means I either have to cram more material for the hour-and-a-half periods, or stretch the existing topics for the hour-long classes. Not surprisingly, I chose the latter.

I continued to the next Cycle of Nature in my 230pm class though, Eclipses. This is in spite of insistent questions about the coverage of the finals and how many more topics we were taking up, and comments about the overhead projector and the chalk "getting tired".

When I asked a student to get me another projector from one of the other classrooms, he said it was already time. We stopped in the middle of the types of solar eclipses.

At least in this class I could stretch the time in the next three periods then.

I wonder if this is how talk show hosts feel.