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

First day of classes. I guess I will have to give at least the highlights of the day so far even though I haven't finished with the Freshman Orientation last Wednesday or the Faculty Workshop after that. This is so that I don't forget what I believe to be the important points of today.

First of all, when my cousin and I arrived in school at 715am, there were already about half a dozen freshmen who were there before us. Talk about eager not to miss a class.

There were also postings all over the campus of the room assignments for all the classes, something that had not been given out until today, or maybe last Saturday. It was only of minimal help to me, because I wasn't aware of my finalized schedule yet.

There are five sections in Math 1, two of which have a 940-1110am schedule even though the rest are set at 8-930am. But despite this, all the first year students taking up Math 1 were required to have the diagnostic exam at 8-930am.

There were four rooms that the students were at. But there were only three proctors: two regular teachers (including me) and the new guidance counselor, Margie. Maila, the third (or first) teacher and the one who made the test, isn't here today.

She just gave the questionnaire to the Registrar's Office to be reproduced, along with orders for exam booklets. The registrar's office then gave it to the dean's secretary, where we found it.

Since there were more rooms that teachers, I had to tell the occupants of one of the rooms to just distrubute themselves among the other rooms for the test, and only for the test. I had to specify that during the lecture sessions, they would still go to the rooms and sections assigned to them.

The freshmen didn't look any more like lost sheep until after I distributed the test booklets, because a while after that, I had to give them the instructions to write their names on the booklets.

There turned out to be only thirty seats per room. I was at capacity plus one, who I let sit at the teacher's desk. If the other rooms were the same as this one, that meant that only 93 out of the 103 (last count as of Wednesday) students could be accomodated.

Margie solved the problem by asking the late students to get chairs from the unoccupied room and putting them on the platform where she let them sit. Since when I had filled my room I had given her all my extra questionnaires and test booklets, I couldn't get any more additional students to take the exam in my room.

Some of the students were asking if they could use calculators. Since not everyone brought a calculator, we decided in the interest of fairness to disallow calculators from the test, although they should have been told beforehand if they or couldn't use them.

At 910am, one student from my room already passed his paper. After that, I announced to the class that when they submit their papers, they should put the questionnaire inside the test booklet.

They ALL started doing so. I caught on immediately and repeated that they should do that WHEN they finished, and told them that they still had twenty minutes to go.

Since not all of the items required solutions, I also had to tell them to indicate which pages were scratch and which pages were their computations for part III.

Wow, even this will take more than a day to relate. I'll have to empty my backlog next time.