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

Going back to my Thursday quiz, students passed their papers earlier in the first exam, but only because I knew they “gave up” instead of finished fast. In the second class, where my cousin was, students didn’t pass their papers until 10 minutes before the time. I even heard my cousin tell one of his classmates that he won’t be sleeping easily that night because of the exam.

I don’t know if he was just putting a front, because he said he answered problems from the book, and the problems were taken directly from the book with just the values changed, as I had warned the students when I told them about the textbook and its conditional requirement.

I guess I’ll find out how well he did when I check their papers this weekend.

I’ve also started to realize that when a student asks how many quizzes there will be for the whole term, it means that they feel they did badly in the current (or recently concluded) one and that they plan to make up for it in the next one.

The very inquisitive student, Justin, in fact, was already saying something about a retake while still taking the quiz. Not that I would have allowed him. And I guess he knew that because he took back his words as soon as he didn’t get a reaction from me.

One of the smart students in my Math class last term, a former Math major, who is also my student this term in both Trig and mechanics, again asked me before the exam about bringing index cards to the exam with all the formulas listed. I told him for the umpteenth time, making sure that he could see I was serious this time, and reminded him that I was telling him for the umpteenth time, that the basic equations will be given in the test paper from which they can derive all the formulas needed.

At the very least, if majority of the students feel that the quiz was difficult, I can just rationalize that it is the first test, from which I could gauge their level of understanding more than the class exercises every meeting. Let them conclude then that the difficulty of the exam will be adjusted to their capability.

For the quiz, I also used the rejected test booklets that were lying around in the faculty room. They were of cheap quality; even the printer knew it, and they donated them in lieu of producing better ones. In one of our meetings last term we had decided to give them to the Student Council to sell to the students to raise funds.

So I thought the SC had their own bulk that they sold, other than the stack in the faculty room. What Maila told me today was that there is no other stack. What is in the faculty room is what the SC is selling. What she does is that after she uses them for her exams, the Student Council now collects the payment from the students, using the list of examinees that Maila gives them.

I guess I’ll have to provide the SC with a list of those who took my quiz last Tuesday. Since some of my students are officers, I guess it’s up to them to remind me to give them the class list. I will have to check though if the Treasurer is one of my students, otherwise I’ll have to determine which officer I’ll approach eventually.

Wow, I’m putting a lot of reflection into this, maybe because it’s supposed to be my specialization, not like the subjects I taught last term: Math and Graphics.