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

Exam in Trig today. It consisted of about half the same questions that was in their last quiz, which was about sum to product and product to sum identities (including the verification of an equation and the exact values of certain angles), and the properties of the graphs of sine and cosine equations.

The other half was of the application of the law of sines and the law of cosines. I had one problem of each of the possible scenarios (only two angles and one side given, one angle and two sides given, and three sides given) and one word problem for each.

It was understood that by process of elimination if they could not use the law of sines, they should use the law of cosines.

The problem student whose mother (and stepfather the first time with the dean) talked to us teachers arrived at forty minutes after we started, but technically an hour and ten minutes since the scheduled start of the exam. The delay was caused by the photocopying machine not having been refilled of toner since yesterday, and we had to request for use of the photocopier in the accounting office.

Hopefully tomorrow, with the mechanics lab finals which is at least three pages, the machine would have been fixed by then.

There was also one underachieving student who sat in front of the class' highest performer. The guy left well before the others did, and the students who were left, after they had passed their papers started talking about what he was doing.

They called him the giraffe, because his neck was long enough to look at the paper of the guy behind him. The guy he was copying from was already ill at ease because he saw that I was looking at them from the start. I even threw in that the guy was already looking at the other's paper less than two minutes after I handed out the questionnaires. What, he thought he could get something right then?

It seems the guy he was copying from was already apprehensive that he'd do that, and he were asking for his more reliable classmates to sit in front of and beside him during the test. Unfortunately, the girl they asked to sit in front of him didn't hear what they were requesting.

I even joked about using a phone camera and catching the guy in the act. Either he was very oblivious to the fact that what he was doing was obvious, or he didn't care as long as he didn't get bawled out.

Now let's see if his exam results would merit him a passing grade. Worse comes to worst I ask him for a retake, and if he passes that one, then I would have achieved my purpose, which is to get him to study.

As for the mechanics lecture consideration I was talking about yesterday, even if I did not cut them the same slack I did for my Trig students (if I had used the same questions there from my previous exams, the students in Trig today would have been expecting it), it seems that talking to their friends from outside the school, they got the impression that I would not have given them the second project if they did not really need the requirements to boost their grades up to a passing mark.

Regardless of what they believe about their standing in the class and what I'm doing about it either taking advantage of their desperation to pass or using every opportunity to make them pass, the fact is that we still need those equipment they will be submitting in the lab.