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

Not surprisingly, the students who took the exam last night thought it was really difficult. What was surprising was that the students who took the exam last Tuesday night, when they saw the exam for Wednesday, said it was easier than theirs. At least at first glance.

One thing that I told some students was that since very few people consulted, that I assumed those who did not approach me had already understood the lesson. So it was also something that I did not expect that the students even mentioned to me that they had hired a professional tutor to help them with studying the night before the exam.

A lot of good it did them, they realized in the end.

Another problem is that some students say that during the practice sessions they understand everything perfectly, but somehow get lost in the exam itself. Again, something that I think can be solved through answering sample questions.

During the exam itself last night, there were still a lot of students talking to each other. I told them about the deductions the whole class would suffer when I started counting, and that kept them quiet - for a while.

It also irked me that a lot of them nurtured a sense of defeatism, asking me during the exam about dropping, about the number of exams in the future, adjusting the percentage of the exam based on the overall performance, about the weight of the projects and the field trip in the final grade.

In fact, what kept me from counting again was that one of them said, "Might as well keep talking, my score will be in the negative anyway."

Talking about it with Maila afterwards, she said that it was popular among the students to make fun of their failures, such that it even dragged the potential topnotchers into the practice, as the speaker had said in last Friday's seminar.

Afterwards, when the students in the other room (guarded by Maila) let out a little earlier that the one I proctored, and one of the students even went up to me and said that Joey, who performs well in Trig and my other math subject last term, only got the first two numbers.

The student said the same about Leland, the highest ranking engineering student. Maila, on the other hand, told me afterwards that my exam made her more impressed with Leland's abilities. Talk about not wanting not to fit in.

Anyway, for today's lecture classes, I started with a recitation on the fundamental concepts, the best way I know at the moment for making sure that they know the basics before the next test, unlike what was demonstrated to me by the questions they asked during the exam. I told them that that was how we would start each session.

I also started on the next topic, friction, which is needed for the next experiment in the lab.

For my Trig class, we met in the computer lab and I showed them how to graph the simple trigonometric functions using a spreadsheet software's charting feature.

And that's today in a nutshell.