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

On Wednesday, despite having woken up at 330am, I was still able to help out in David’s laboratory classes without catching up on sleep. The pick-up truck from the school I visited was able to bring me back to the campus by 830am.

Last Monday, during my mechanics lecture class I had told the students that the second experiment would be Composition of Concurrent Forces instead of Projectile Motion. Two days afterwards, planning to buy some protractors from the in-campus bookstore for the students’ use in the experiment, I found out that they did not have any for sale.

Good thing I found out about this early, because I then went around the computer lab, David’s Introduction to Robotics lecture and Citas’ English class to tell the students about the fact that they would need to buy protractors (one per group) outside the campus for use in this week’s experiment, at least an hour before the first lab class started. I assumed they would already ask their classmates who were still on their way to school to buy for them.

During the 11am-2pm class, not all the groups were able to get protractors though. And worse, the students took the whole three hours, some of them extending beyond that, to finish the experiment.

This is because first of all, I had to remind the students again that they should finish all the measurements first before completing the computations and tables. Or at least the group leaders should delegate the work so that they would finish earlier.

Second, despite the quiz at the start of each meeting, most of the students were still not preparing for the experiment and only reading the procedure during the session itself.

Third, the fourth group of students, which was composed chiefly of those who did not attend during the first meeting (giving an inkling as to their attitude towards studying), were self-admittedly not working on the experiment. In fact, their most responsible member, Joanne, also the only girl, started crying out of hopelessness during the meeting because her group members were all just playing a singing song instead of helping her finish the experiment.

The other groups found the singing a welcome distraction from their tedious work, but when there was a proposal that the group be split up to the three remaining groups, the rest of the class vetoed it and threatened to walk about because they knew those students would not be sharing the work in their group.

In the end, the group, resigned to being stuck together but not wanting anyone else to suffer with their low comprehension of the work, just said they were willing to let Joanne shift to another group if she wanted.

I don’t know what deal they were able to work out with David when he talked to them later on, but I’m planning to just guide them along a little more thoroughly through the experiment next meeting. David can concentrate on the rest of the class.

The 2 to 5pm class is another story altogether that will have to wait until another time, as well as yesterday’s lecture classes on simplifying and verifying trigonometric identities and, in mechanics, starting the discussion on projectile motion.